The Cursed, the review of the horror film on Netflix

In 1881, in the French countryside, the powerful landowner Seamus Laurent hires a team of mercenaries to deal with a clan of gypsies who have settled on his lands, rightly claiming the right: a massacre will follow. But having foreseen the imminent danger, the Romani priestess had forged a set of silver teeth in the shape of wolf fangs, which was supposed to guarantee their protection. Following the massacre, the children of the community begin to be victim of disturbing nightmaresamong them also the children of Seamus himself, the teenager Charlotte and the little Edward.

As we tell you in review of The Cursedthe farmer’s very young son suggests to his peers that they go to the place that appears in their dreams, where it is a disturbing scarecrow; right there they come across a silver denture and little Tom is bitten by one of his friends, who has been possessed by that strange object. It will be the beginning of a series of increasingly strange and macabre eventswhich will require the intervention of pathologist John McBride, who in turn hides a tragic mystery in his tormented past.

Quicksilver

Also known by the title Eight for Silver – to quote that nursery rhyme recited several times by the young protagonists – The Cursed intends to update the theme of lycanthropy in the modern panorama of horror cinema, a largely successful attempt and capable of finally offering something original in its related sub-strand. We are in fact faced with a highly atmospheric, genuinely scary film in different passages and with references to body horror that disturb at the right point, giving “glory and life to the new wereflesh“, citing with due modification a great classic by David Cronenberg. After the short prologue set in the future of 1916, with the soldiers engaged on the front in the First World War, the story unfolds in thatrural setting where an unspeakable horror took placenot hidden by a direction that shows what needs to be shown, without delighting in pure violence but not even without hiding it, effectively fully justifying the genesis of the curse to come.

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A cruel time

A costume story set in the open countryside, with the fog that hides supernatural dangers and the woods that offer potential refuge to primordial creatures, which awaken that forgetful nature and they transmute bodies into atrocious lacerations, a symptom of a now unstoppable transformation. Precisely the suggestive context increases and not a little thatgloomy and restless atmospherewhich accompanies the fate of the unfortunate protagonists until the dramatic showdown.
The Cursed can partly be considered as a very free spin-off of The pact of the wolves (2001), as it recalls the historical event – real or presumed – relating to the Beast of Gévaudanthat is to say a mysterious ferocious animal (or more than one) which caused dozens of victims in the French region of the same name in the mid-eighteenth century, a case never completely resolved and which some link to otherworldly contexts.

Sharp teeth

Between biblical references and the figure of Judas, a marital relationship on its last legs and the dark past of this pathologist returning from a huge tragedy, the relative background and management of the various characters are well blended by the director and screenwriter Sean Elliswhich we remember above all for an instant cult of the caliber of Metro Manila (2012), but who in the past has tried his hand at titles that are not perfect but full of potential also in the horror field, as in The Broken (2008). In The Cursed manages to capture the right gothic tones, with that pinch of metaphorical jolts peeping out here and there in a captivating narrative full of twists and turnswith excellent special effects and a fascinating creature design that also intelligently exploits the see/not see, reaching the primordial roots of fear to face a story of death and rebirth.