The Cursed – A Review

The Cursed, a new gothic horror film now available on Amazon Prime, falls into the long tradition of having English speaking actors play characters from non-English speaking countries. In this case, British accents replace the voices of late 1800s French people. Other countries don’t seem to do this. There’s not a movie set in the Bronx with German actors playing real New Yorkers in German for example. I would like to see something like that though. Better yet if they did it the out of fashion way with German actors purposely sounding like English speakers trying to speak German.

If the actors in The Cursed had put on French accents it would have been more entertaining. I found myself forgetting the film was set in France and wanting more to happen. It falls somewhere between being not scary enough and not pursuing its fun, gory side to its fullest potential. Although maybe the film rightfully loses its taste for humans killing other humans.

The film opens promisingly at the Battle of the Somme in the First World War. A wounded French soldier gets carried to a field hospital. We see hands and feet get amputated left and right. A surgeon removes three German bullets from the man’s abdomen. Then he pulls out a fourth mysterious silver bullet.

It’s a truly fantastic opening that the rest of the film doesn’t live up to. The film travels back in time 35 years to the late 1800s. A Roma encampment have a claim on the land used by a stern wealthy man named Seamus (Alastair Petrie). Seamus lives in a stately home with his wife Isabelle (Kelly Reilly) and their young son (Max Mackintosh) and teenage daughter (Amelia Crouch).  Seamus and a council of village elders decide to slaughter the Roma people. An extended wide shot of the whole encampment shows the human destruction from a mesmerizing distance. Up close the brutality is not spared. Seamus’s men hack off hands and feet. A Roma man is hung up to die like a scarecrow. A Roma woman is buried alive. As the dirt hits her face, her last moments of life go completely silent and instead we hear the far away voices of Seamus’s children singing along to their mother’s piano, safe for now in their mansion.

It’s very striking to play the children’s voices over her imminent death. It suggests that although they know nothing of their father’s evil, that doesn’t make them innocent. The Roma characters are wiped out. They only remain in the movie in the form of a curse: a pair of silver teeth buried with the woman. The teeth and the scarecrow call to the townsfolk in their dreams.

A mysterious beast appears. It attacks Seamus and Isabelle’s son. But it’s hard to care. What emotional resonance can the disappearance of one child have when we’ve just seen an entire group of people massacred in vivid detail? Especially when the boy’s father is the lead perpetrator. Boyd Holbrook shows up as a pathologist named John McBride. He’s there to hunt the cursed beast, a form of which we discover killed his own wife and child. But again it’s almost impossible to care in the shadow of what we’ve been shown.

The monster design goes for a twist on the classic werewolf but feels and looks bland like a boiled chicken breast. It actually really looks like a snarling boiled chicken breast. The last half of the film gives another nice wide shot of men on horseback heading out to capture the beast with their hunting dogs. The fog rolling in is very pretty. But much like the townspeople trapped and waiting in the church for the beast to be dealt with, for the last half of the film I was just wondering when it would be over.

The ending connects to the dying soldier at the beginning of the film in a beautiful way, though the moment is robbed of its power by the long forgotten killing of the Roma encampment, an action so vile which the movie makes feel incidental to the plot. Everything loses its perspective.

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