The Cursed review: a gory werewolf story built around terrible stereotypes

You have to say this for Sean Ellis’ horror movie Cursed: It doesn’t waste much time on talking that it could spend on bloodshed. This film was shown at the 2021 Cannes Film Festivals under a more descriptive title. Eight For SilverBritish villager in 1880s Britain are up against supernatural forces that include a monster who stalks their farms and forests. It often uses visceral, practical effects to cause nausea in its victims. But the beast’s origins are far uglier, and far more likely to leave the audience unsettled — sometimes in exactly the wrong ways.

So much independent horror is made on a shoestring budget these days that it’s honestly surprising to see how richly appointed and casually expensive CursedFirst, in an opening scene set on the World War I battlefield. Then, in a flashback set 35 years ago that occupies most of the movie. Seamus Laurent (Alistair Petrie), a wealthy and powerful aristocrat sends a team of bloodthirsty, violent thugs in order to slaughter a Romani group that established camp next to a British settlement. The Romani have a legitimate legal claim to the land that would compete with those local elites’ use of it, so simply forcing them to move on won’t do — Seamus and the others conspire to wipe them out, alter the land records, and bury the evidence in the field where the camp once was.

Shortly after that, all the children in the area start to dream about an eerie scarecrow in that field and an occult item buried under it, and Seamus’ children, Charlotte (Amelia Crouch) and Edward (Max Mackintosh) join the village kids in nervously visiting the site. The events escalate and Edward vanishes. It becomes clear that there is something else in the area. When pathologist John McBride (Boyd Holbrook) arrives, asking questions about “gypsies” in the area, he patches together the recent events and goes into full Witcher mode, setting up to battle the creature while holding onto his own secrets about what he knows.

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Cursed has its own mythology and some unnerving, bloody innovations around what’s basically a werewolf story, but Ellis gets a lot of his mileage around the standard creature-feature horror-story things he doesn’t do. John doesn’t bother explaining the were-beast to Seamus and his pallid, subdued wife Isabelle (Kelly Reilly) up front — instead of piling up the exposition, he smoothly deflects or dodges most questions, in ways that both make him seem more mysterious than the average horror-movie protagonist, and a whole lot wiser. He seems to be able to understand small-town politics, and the reactions of men such as Seamus to circumstances beyond their control. Ellis also doesn’t bore the audience with “There’s no such thing as werewolves” wheel-spinning, or by making the characters’ knowledge lag behind what the audience has already seen. This leaves the beast free to tear people apart in an array of visually stunning and memorable attacks.

Ellis’ eye as a cinematographer is the film’s greatest asset, and the place where CursedMost stands out among a crowd of gory genre exercises. His talent for creating rich imagery is crucial to the mood he’s trying to set. When John or Seamus nervously edge out of a manor house’s protection at night, they seem as dwarfed by the vast weight of the pre-industrial dark around them as if they were falling off a ship and into the sea. Scenes such as the one in which three workers fight an unforgiving fog after the first attack by a beast add to the chaotic chaos. The movie stands out from the other slashers streaming on Netflix, thanks to the skill that was put into the long-distance shots of the Romani massacre. There’s a sumptuous feel to the staging — the costumes and sets all have weight, and the cast brings a compelling, convincing intensity to the material, but this is primarily a movie to watch for the visuals.

Ellis is prone to getting stuck on jump-scare horror stories and endless trips to the scarecrow haunted. It feels more like an echo than a joke because so many people have visited the same spot. That dark joke has a decent punchline — there are so many scarecrow visits that they start to blur, and so does the line between reality and dreams. The recurring image of Seamus’s horror, which represents his types on the planet, feels too generic to be as effective as Ellis would like.

There are many CursedThis is the problem. The set-dressing here is too familiar: those tedious nightmare fakeout scares and wake-up-gasping moments, kids singing an eerie nursery rhyme that’s immediately relevant to the events at hand, generic CGI crawliness overlaying the more convincing practical work. Ellis keeps repeating other elements as well, with three people in a row disappearing from bloody beds, and too many characters braving the dangerous outdoors to do work that could plausibly be postponed until there isn’t a monster at large.

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The moral undercurrent that runs throughout the entire universe is what gives rise to this last element. Cursed, about the traumas of working-class life, and the disdain the wealthy and powerful show for anyone else’s lives and humanity. The film only gets full-force preachy about that theme once, in a moment where John’s frustration overwhelms his diplomacy, and by that time, it does feel welcome and overdue. But CursedEllis demonstrates how Seamus’ class and greedy, amoral and arrogant members of a community can take over.

That theme gets a little exhausting, especially when it’s limited to such a shallow, surface-level presentation, meant only to give the story a hiss-worthy villain and a sheen of self-righteous indignation. However relevant and accurate the central point is, it’s still true that most of Cursed consists of watching innocent people, especially women and children, suffer in grotesque and ghastly ways because of Seamus’ selfish choices. Knowing that it’s all a morality play doesn’t make the wall-to-wall anguish of the vulnerable and undeserving any easier to endure.

And for viewers with a sense of history, it’s also hard to escape how CursedThis story uses racist stereotypes to its core, portraying Romani victims in occultists using hideous black magic. Using a “gypsy curse” as a plot device was a hoary old horror cliché back when Stephen King did it in Thinner in 1984, or even back when Lon Chaney Jr. forged America’s screen werewolf tradition in 1941’s Wolf Man. This is a shockingly negative feeling. The trope will resurface 2022 without any thought or examination. Compounding the problem: The Romani curse literally steals Seamus’ child, another widely spread racist stereotype that should have been buried long ago.

The unavoidable central problem of Cursed sours an awful lot of the action, and makes a story that seems to aspire to the artful horror of Robert Eggers’ The Witch Instead of envelope-pushing, look retrograde. There’s a real old-school Hammer Horror vibe to this movie, with the garish fake red blood replaced by something a lot thicker and more arterial. But maybe it all could have used a little more thoughtful discussion about its basic ideas — both onscreen, among characters who take the lessons here for granted without offering any cathartic realizations or conclusions, and offscreen, before Ellis mixed up a horrifying fictional monster that refuses to die, and horrifying ethnic prejudices that have the same problem.

CursedThis film is currently in cinemas.