The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C
I was quite surprised when I did my weekly check on the listings at my local movie theater and discovered a horror movie that I had never heard of before. Considering my daily visits to multiple horror news websites, it’s rare that a horror flick manages to sneak into 1,600 theaters without my prior knowledge. A marketing department almost has to strive for that level of ineptitude. Even more intriguingly, I discovered that The Cursed is a werewolf movie and I love werewolf movies. In the eight years that I’ve been making weekly treks to the movie theater, I had not seen one frigging werewolf movie (or vampire movie, for that matter), as the horror genre has been obsessed with haunting and possession movies for the last decade. For that reason alone, I was very much looking forward to seeing this movie. Unfortunately, after seeing it, I would still say that I haven’t seen a werewolf movie in a theater in the last decade. The Cursed is a film that values style over scares and the subversion of expectations over entertainment value, ultimately feeling like a Halloween haunted house designed by the snootiest people in your neighborhood.
We begin with a completely unnecessary prologue in World War I before jumping back in time 35 years. Interestingly, this marks the second time in the last three weeks that I’ve seen a movie with a pointless WWI prologue (the other being Death on the Nile). The film then centers on an (I think) English village, where a land baron has ordered the mass execution of a tribe of gypsies to remove them from his land. The gypsies respond, as they tend to do in movies, with a curse and soon the village’s children are having nightmares and a strange creature (werewolf?) begins ripping the villagers to shreds.
On the positive side, The Cursed is an excellent looking film. The locales and atmosphere are dripping with the sort of classic horror mood that one would find in a 1940s Universal or 1960s Hammer film. From foggy forests to creepy churches, The Cursed has all of the trappings of a classic monster movie. The cinematography is extremely well-executed, particularly during the attack on the gypsy camp that acts as the inciting incident of the story. This sequence is legitimately disturbing, as the camera settles in a single location, providing an immobile, widescreen view the massacre of an entire camp of people. The staging of this scene is remarkable, as carnage ensues without a single cut in a sequence with dozens of actors that must have taken an obscene amount of rehearsal to execute properly. If I will remember anything about this film, it is that sequence.
In fact, the first twenty minutes or so are quite effective. The building tensions between the baron and the gypsies and the resulting brutality of the camp massacre are among the best scenes that I have seen in a horror film in years. People are burned and chopped up and buried alive, one poor bastard is turned into a human scarecrow, women are dragged into the woods by their hair (presumably not for a polite chat and cup of tea). It is truly harrowing stuff with, unfortunately, very little payoff.
Following those early sequences, The Cursed begins to falter the moment that it transitions into being a supernatural horror film because the filmmakers seem almost embarrassed of the genre. Despite the fact that it looks akin to a classic Universal or Hammer film, The Cursed goes to great lengths to avoid delivering a classic werewolf story. In fact, I’m not sure that it delivers a werewolf story at all. Although silver is integral to the plot and the gypsy curse storyline harkens back to The Wolf Man, there is no mention of full moons, there are no real transformation scenes and, in my estimation, there aren’t any actual werewolves. People turn into monsters, sure, but they look like computer-generated albino rats more than they do werewolves. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I like my werewolves to look like werewolves, not like sewer rats that found some leftover ooze from the Ninja Turtles.
The bland characters don’t help matters, either. Despite strong performances from a cast of relative unknowns, there is little for anyone to do other than stand around with facial expressions that convey a mixture of impending doom and mild confusion. If there is a main character, I suppose it would be Boyd Holbrook as John McBride, a pathologist that has encountered the gypsy curse of albino rats before (this was apparently a common problem at the time). This creates a narrative issue, as John is the only character that knows what’s happening while simultaneously being vague about it in order to preserve the mystery. That’s not particularly helpful in the context of the story and leaves us, as the audience, quite bored as we wait for the obvious to be revealed. It is kind of like watching a murder mystery where the audience knows who did it and the detective in the story knows who did it, but we still need to act intrigued for a couple of hours while we wait for the slower folks to catch up. That is not a recipe for entertainment.
The Cursed is a frustrating experience, as it seems to feel that it is above its own material and loses all momentum as a result. The result is intellectual tedium rather than classic horror and the latest foray into so-called elevated horror that made me want to take a nap. If the werewolf equivalent of The Witch (or The VVitch, as it’s insistently called by people that don’t understand how fonts work) sounds intriguing to you, then The Cursed is worth a watch. Those, such as myself, that are looking for something in the vein of An American Werewolf in London or The Howling should steer clear.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cursed_(2021_film)#/media/File:The_Cursed_(2021_film).jpeg
