The Cursed
The Cursed
Starring Boyd Holbrook, Kelly Reilly, Alistair Petrie, Roxane Duran
Directed by Sean Ellis
In the late nineteenth century in Europe, the wealthy landowner Seamus Laurent (Alistair Petrie) wants to own all the land, but there's a small parcel occupied by a group of Roma, and despite offering to purchase it from them, refuse to give up their land. He hires a group of mercenaries to slaughter the Roma, leaving one as a scarecrow and burying alive his wife below him. Before she dies, she places a curse on Seamus with a set of wolves' teeth made out of the thirty pieces of silver that bribed Judas into giving up Jesus. Shortly after, Seamus's children - and the children of the other landowners responsible for the slaughter - begin having nightmares of the scarecrow and the teeth. When Seamus's son Edward goes missing, he enlists the local police force to find him, and traveling pathologist John McBride (Boyd Holbrook) joins the efforts, believing what is out there is also what was responsible for his wife and daughters' deaths as well. While investigating, John uncovers the teeth and learns about the curse, and believes that Seamus and the other men responsible for killing the Roma are being hunted by werewolves from the silver teeth, and the only way to stop them is silver bullets made by those teeth - but is Seamus and his wife Isabelle (Kelly Reilly) ready to face the fact that they might lose their son in the process?
"The Cursed" offers a unique spin in the werewolf genre in that here they're creations made by the Roma who use it to curse those who murdered them, and whose appearance is vastly different than traditional werewolf molds. They also exhibit different hunting styles and transformations, even though they still adhere to the traditional rule set (if you're bit and don't die, you become a werewolf, only way to kill it is with silver, etc.), but they also have a different layer that makes them uniquely different as well. The issue here is that there's no real reason why this is, or the rules of this particular motif, as it seemingly changes from infected to infected.
The performances are adequate enough, but none really stand out as anything memorable. Boyd Holbrook is your traditional Van Helsing-style killer while Alistair Petrie plays the typical money-hungry Seamus, and Kelly Reilly is your typical fearful mother Isabelle. Ain't really anything else to say about it.
The script - written by director Sean Ellis - tends to spin on its own wheels throughout the nearly two-hour runtime. There's no real character development between the characters, and you don't particularly care about the fate of anyone involved. You're just there to see the carnage that the werewolves wreak, and they're quite impressive. Limbs, cuts, and blood-stained linens dot the countryside, but that only serves as a memory of other creature feature films like "The Thing" (including a gleefully gross autopsy). Likewise, the cinematography is stunningly beautiful and effective, fully immersing you in the world of gothic horror with the use of natural light, dead trees, and cryptic buildings - but these only serve to impose memories of the likes of "Sleepy Hollow (right up to one pivotal scene in a church that seems eerily similar) and other gothic horror films. "The Cursed" seems to not know where it belongs, and serves as a detriment to the story.
The film relies heavily on underlying tones of religion and genocide to get its point across, and on these ends the film is its strongest. As someone who studied religion intently, the idea that the literal thirty pieces of silver that was used to entice Judas to give up Jesus being the same pieces of silver that created the cursed silver teeth was a stroke of genius, but the film doesn't stop there. It takes on the verse in Exodus 20:5 - "you shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me." Instead of the cursed werewolves going straight after the men physically responsible for killing the Roma, they haunt the dreams of their children and attack them instead. While this could be seen as a way of striking down the innocent for the guilty, the genocide was done with so much animosity that you still feel bad for the Roma and the curse itself, as you feel bad for the children as well.
The genocide is one of the most powerfully shot moments of the film, as the entire Roma community is mowed down by Seamus and his men. You might think this is a large commune filled with people, but it's literally about one-half acre of land with about three tents and twenty or so people, and still Seamus was driven by greed and didn't care who he slaughtered to get what he wanted. The entire massacre was shot high on a hill with a still camera, and doesn't zoom in, cut away, or change direction in any sort: it forces you to witness the senseless killing firsthand, as if you're watching from the hilltop at their demise. It's really the only memorable moment the film provides on its own.
While offering some fun practical effects and an unflinching look at genocide and the atrocities people put on one another, "The Cursed" doesn't really offer anything else new to the werewolf genre, and while it's beautifully shot and there's enough copious gore effects, will fail to remain in your memory days after viewing.
The Score: B-
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