"The Cursed" an impressively grim, atmospheric werewolf tale

 

The Cursed (2022) 

The horror genre hasn’t seen a serious werewolf movie in a while, until “The Cursed.” Though it played at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival under the more enigmatic title “Eight for Silver,” the film needn’t be judged merely by its overly definitive, seemingly generic title change. Dread-inducing and gory when it needs to be, this grim period horror tale reimagines lycanthropic lore and colonialism in ways that feel urgent and accomplished for writer-director-cinematographer Sean Ellis (2016’s “Anthropoid”).

In 19th-century France, land baron Seamus Laurent (Alistair Petrie) orders a clan of Roma nomad gypsies camped out on his land to be slaughtered. The particular dismemberment of a blacksmith and the live burial of a gypsy woman incites a curse on the wealthy Seamus and his family, who start having nightmares of a scarecrow (actually the corpse of the blacksmith who had his hands severed and stuffed with straw before being strung up on a post). When Seamus’ children Charlotte (Amelia Crouch) and Edward (Max Mackintosh) gather with other village children in a field where the scarecrow is hung, one of them foolishly digs up the silver teeth in the ground, slips them in his mouth, and promptly attacks Edward. Not long after, Seamus and his wife Isabelle (Kelly Reilly) are distressed to find their boy missing. Enter emotionally wounded pathologist John McBride (Boyd Holbrook), who begins to have more supernatural theories when the townsmen believe it’s just a wild animal attacking their children. As the village becomes increasingly doomed on account of Seamus’ buried secrets, will justice be served, or is the beast doing just that?

Recent genre gems like “Werewolves Within” and “The Wolf of Snow Hollow” were infused with a more blackly comic streak and offbeat energy. Comparatively, “The Cursed” is more humorless in tone and deliberately paced, two features that still don’t make it a slog. Director Ellis pulls no punches with the upper class’s inhumanity to the lower class or the beast’s brutality of mangling bodies, but great care has also been taken to create this village from an earlier time being ruined by its historical sins. Early on in the film, Ellis (working as his own cinematographer) chillingly captures the genocide of the Romani in a static wide shot; as the tableau slowly changes with shots being fired, bodies falling to the ground, and tents erupting into flames, it’s kept from a distance but no less barbaric and upsetting. 

Filmmaker Ellis also has a visual eye for brutal gothic horror and building dread. He gets ample mileage out of the field scarecrow, which doesn’t even have to come to life (or turn its head) to be forbidding. In the apprehension leading up to one of the beast’s attacks, blades of grass moving like a great white shark making its way in the water is an artful, inspiredly macabre touch. Only does Ellis seem to include too many gotcha nightmares so closely together, but even then, these scare moments don’t feel like lazy, tacked-on crutches when they’re effective and germane to the curse plaguing the Laurents. Apart from the occasional use of CGI for the shapeshifting beast, which wisely gets obscured, the body-horror practical effects are quite astonishing and disgustingly goopy for some tendril-emerging creature transformations. 

If the script is a little thin on characterization, the actors are uniformly in tune with the look and speak of the time period. Whereas filmmaker Robert Eggers seemingly found Puritan settlers still kicking on this planet to make “The Witch,” Sean Ellis has a more recognizable cast (primarily Kelly Reilly and Boyd Holbrook) but still wrings fine performances out of them. Holbrook, in particular, is the film’s taciturn and tragic conduit as the Ichabod Crane-like John McBride but also versatile in meshing with the period and making us care about the outcome of the story. Thick with evocative, fog-shrouded atmosphere and not lacking indelibly eerie imagery, “The Cursed” shocks and impresses as a piece of period horror filmmaking.

Grade: B

LD Entertainment is releasing “The Cursed” (113 min.) in theaters on February 18, 2022.