Main cast: Boyd Holbrook (John McBride), Kelly Reilly (Isabelle Laurent), Alistair Petrie (Seamus Laurent), Roxane Duran (Anais), Nigel Betts (Alfred Moliere), Stuart Bowman (Saul), Simon Kunz (Mr Griffin), Amelia Crouch (Charlotte), Max Mackintosh (Edward), Tommy Rodger (Timmy), and Áine Rose Daly (Anne-Marie)
Director: Sean Ellis
I’m always up for a good werewolf flick, and I’ve heard good things about The Cursed. Even better, it’s a period werewolf flick set in England in the late 19th century. Werewolves and English accent all in the same movie? Oh, I can’t wait to sink my teeth into this one.
First, the story. The movie starts out with what is possibly its most expensive scene: soldiers in the Battle of the Somme getting gassed and mowed down by bullets. While roughly pulling out bullets from one fellow, the surgeon is perplexed to discover a silver bullet certainly not of German origin in that bloke. Well, how did it get there?
We then cut back 35 years to get the answer, and honestly, this is where my first issue with the movie lies. The entire opening and ending bookend scenes are unnecessary, as they add nothing to the overall story at all. It’s just some framing device that the people behind this thing believe that will make them appear very, very smart. Well, that or they probably need some expensive scenes to justify where laundered money gets sunk into, who knows.
The meat of the story is landowner Seamus Laurent committing a vicious pogrom on the gypsies on his land, and in the process, caused the people to be cursed by nightmares about death and other fun things. Worse, a werewolf infection eventually breaks out, and right in the center of this mess is Seamus’s son Edward.
Into the scene comes John McBride, a pathologist that has been tracking the gypsies all this while due to a personal tragedy that he believes is linked to them. Can he help the Laurent family as well as the folks of this town?
Now, let me first rattle off the things I like.
The costumes and the location are gorgeous, even during scenes that are meant to be eerie and menacing. I also like how the script tries to adhere somewhat to the social mores of the day, and the way the folks of the higher and lower classes just don’t talk to another is one of the main reasons why the mess gets drawn out as long as it is.
Oh, and the younger cast members are not annoying at all, likely because their characters teenagers instead of brats. Well, that and most of them don’t have many lines, heh.
On the other hand, there’s Boyd Holbrook. Now, he’s a gorgeous man, and I have no issues looking at him, but he stands out like a sore thumb for playing a character in a very, shall I say, American way, while the characters around him are so believably French. His accent isn’t the best, and worse, the script allows John to be the only character that happily flaunts social norms and somehow is still allowed to get away with this. As a result, this character feels more like a walking plot device with obvious plot armor than a believable hero in his own right.
Also, I should point out that there are hardly any werewolf action until very late into the movie, and this one is more of a horror-mystery film than anything else. This is an issue because for a mystery, well, the answers have been spoon fed to the audience from the get go. The whole thing is a mystery only to John, and the audience is left with nothing to do other than to enjoy the scenery and wait for John to catch up.
As a result of all this, The Cursed is more pretty than compelling. I don’t really mind having spent time watching this, but I’m nowhere as satisfied with the experience as I thought I’d be. It just doesn’t have that bite.
