The Cursed (2022)

Score: 4.5 / 5

This is exactly the kind of movie that needs to be made more often and be seen by more people. The kind of movie we can hope major streaming services will fund or produce or buy. The kind of movie that will die out if we're not careful. An assured, confident, and profoundly accomplished period horror film so rooted in traditional techniques yet so entertaining and intelligent and beautiful that it could appeal to wide audiences. It's also so niche in its cinematic references and its central conceits that it will certainly live on with a cult following. I loved The Cursed unequivocally, although its original title of Eight for Silver was much better.

In the late 19th century, a French (possibly British, based on the accent, but living in France nonetheless) land baron named Seamus Laurent approaches a tribe of Roma people on his land. They had set up camp there and have claim to the territory; he and several men from town slaughter the "gypsies." It's a harrowing early scene, mostly shot in a long take from a nearby hilltop as the camp is burned and the people murdered indiscriminately. Laurent's band tortures and mutilates the two Roma leaders, one becoming a grotesque scarecrow and the other buried alive with a set of fanged dentures of pure silver, but not before they place a curse on Laurent and his estate. Anyone with a working definition of Universal's monster lineup or classic films in general knows that this is grounds for a bona fide werewolf movie, and my joy was instantly piqued.

Much like the mythology and themes of 1941's The Wolf Man, and many of its subsequent sequels, remakes, and re-imaginings, this movie starts from a foundation of exoticizing the Roma people in western Europe and leans slightly into concerns over colonialism and class conflict. There's a concern over silver -- mythologically, pure silver's antibacterial work kills the "infection" of lycanthropy -- though this film interestingly toys with the typical conceit. There's the idea that a person bitten can become a werewolf unless they die first. These ideas aren't really explored in much depth, except for that last one, but it's all there, firmly placing this film within the genre. Interestingly, the more overt -- and more recently exploited -- theme of adolescent sexual awakening manifesting as carnal monstrosity isn't present here at all, which makes this story less predictable and more intense as a sort of whodunnit murder-mystery with a monster (or monsters) on the loose.

Perhaps I'm getting a little ahead of myself. After the Roma slaughter and placement of the curse, the children of the estate begin to have nightmares of the scarecrow and of digging to find the silver dentures. Naturally, they meet up and go to the unholy grave. Writer/director/cinematographer Sean Ellis (The Broken, Anthropoid) is doing astonishing work here, creating a palpably haunted atmosphere that he maintains through the entire film; ethereal and foggy and beautiful all at once, the estate seems perpetually shrouded in twilight, while the gritty and brutal events sometimes make the film feel a little too realistic. Once the kids find the silver teeth and one tries them on, the curse is unleashed, and a Seamus's son Edward is attacked before he disappears. A monster prowls the estate by night, and so the Laurents board up their house and wait inside by candlelight.

This is a Gothic monster movie like we haven't seen in ages, and Ellis knows full well what he's doing for fans of the genre. It helps to have powerhouse actors like Kelly Reilly, Boyd Holbrook, and Alistair Petrie among the cast, especially Reilly doing her best to ramp up the hysterical nature of what is otherwise a fairly male-dominated story. I don't want to say much more about the plot, but it does cycle through usual werewolf beats in sometimes unpredictable ways, or at least ways that play on unusual themes such as colonialism and genocide, and even Marxist critiques of class (a maid gets bitten and hides her wound for fear of getting fired and cast out). The "Other" here is, in fact, much closer than we might at first fear, as evidenced most strongly in the briefly mentioned idea of the sins of the parents visiting (read: cursing or infecting) the children. And, of course, it's the children who initially fall victim to the curse. How much more Gothic can you get?

There is a frame story that didn't quite work as well for me, taking place in the Battle of the Somme in WWI, which I expect ate up a fair bit of the production budget that would have been better allocated elsewhere. But it makes the opening sequence unexpected and exciting, and the ending much more emotionally powerful, so I'll not criticize it too much. I will say that I utterly loved the monster itself, as it felt less wolfish and more monstrous; much like the characterization of witches in Robert Eggers's The Witch, the monsters here aren't easily classifiable and seem to morph based on the perception of the other characters, which makes a ton of sense artistically when attempting to understand the mindset of people without scientific knowledge of these things. Even when the Van Helsing-type character shows up (Holbrook), he only really understands what's happening because it happened to him once before; he calls the monster a wolf because it makes more sense than the reality, and he has to get the Laurents and townsfolk on his side quickly to stop further tragedy. I also really loved the score by Robin Foster, and its heavy reliance on droning, occasionally dissonant synth sound reminded me distinctly of John Carpenter, which in turn made me wonder how much Ellis was influenced by Carpenter too (specifically of The Fog and The Thing). 

Had I made the movie, or at least been in the room, I'd have pushed for a few changes in focus. By the finale, I could tell Ellis felt the need to wrap up the plot strands neatly while still making powerful references (I thought multiple times of The Innocents, The Others, and even Jurassic Park before all was finished). For this viewer, some more time to explore the fascinating intricacies and intrigues of the story and its already-introduced themes would have made the film feel more heady and haunting, like the organized nightmare it seemed at the outset. Pushing the allegorical elements begging to be exploited would have made it all more urgent and more memorable, especially considering the ideas of infection and isolation that have been real-life concerns for two years now. And while it may not have tapped those wells, The Cursed remains a thrilling and beautiful work.