The Cursed

A harrowing reinvention of the classic howler.

Over the river and through the wood: Boyd Holbrook and Kelly Reilly

The first wolfman on film was actually a wolf woman. Now considered lost, the 1913 silent The Werewolf featured a Navajo woman who could turn herself into a wolf. Incidentally, it was released by Carl Laemmle’s Universal, the studio that would go on to make monsters famous. Universal produced the first mainstream Hollywood film featuring the creature, but it wasn’t their 1941 classic The Wolf Man. Six years prior in 1935, Werewolf of London made actor Henry Hull the first upright werewolf, with a minimalist make-up design by Jack Pierce. Pierce famously salvaged his original ideas years later for Lon Chaney Jr’s tormented Larry Talbot. Howling hair-raisers have been hitting the silver screen ever since, including a whole pack of 1980s Canis lupus from The Howling to The Company of Wolves to Teen Wolf. Universal’s attempted ‘Dark Universe’ has yielded mixed results, but if Ryan Gosling’s Wolfman remake moves forward, it would benefit from lessons in lycanthropy from writer-director-cinematographer Sean Ellis’ The Cursed.

No man’s land. The Battle of the Somme, 1917. Soldiers don surgical masks not unlike those worn today. The hell of war sets the scene of a cursed land. Thirty-five years prior, in late 19th century France, a group of Romani return to claim their ancestral terra firma. When the greedy land baron Seamus Laurent (Alistair Petrie) takes hostile action against them, his wife (Kelly Reilly), children and all those under his employ become possessed by forces beyond understanding. Pathologist John McBride (Boyd Holbrook) arrives to investigate the phenomena and unearths an epidemic of biblical origin.

Standing firmly on Chaney’s shoulders, Ellis conjures a stirring reanimation of lycanthropic lore. The Cursed wrings the optimal elements from werewolf mythology and firmly roots them in the heritage of a gothic horror. There’s a lot to appreciate here, including some shots that break tradition to great effect. No full moon transformation can match Rick Baker’s iconic sequence from An American Werewolf in London, but there is a practical effects scene featured here that trumps anything in recent memory, recalling the body horror of Ridley Scott’s Alien and John Carpenter’s The Thing. The sound design is also particularly impressive, using everything from singing to laughter in moments where other films might turn to minor chords. Yet it does fall prey to some tired tropes, such as the perpetual rolling fog and dream sequence jump scares. Thoroughly earning its rating, this isn’t horror for the faint-hearted. Steadied by a fine cast who really sink their teeth in.

CHAD KENNERK

Cast: Boyd Holbrook, Kelly Reilly, Alistair Petrie, Roxane Duran, Áine Rose Daly, Nigel Betts, Stuart Bowman, Simon Kunz. 

Dir Sean Ellis, Pro Pete Shilaimon, Mickey Liddell and Sean Ellis, Screenplay Sean Ellis, Ph Sean Ellis, Pro Des Pascal Le Guellec and Thierry Zemmour, Ed Yorgos Mavropsaridis and Richard Mettler, Music Robin Foster, Costumes Madeline Fontaine, Dialect coach Tanya Blumstein. 

LD Entertainment-Decal/LD Entertainment.
113 mins. USA/France. 2021. US Rel: 18 February 2022. Cert. R.

Thank you to Metropolitan Theatres
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