Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Cursed’ on Hulu, a Sort-of Werewolf Movie Heavy With Atmosphere and Gore

Now on Hulu, The Cursed sells itself as a variation on classic werewolf stories in which the townsfolk are terrorized by a fanged growler who may be susceptible to the sting of a silver bullet. (The film’s original title was the less generic, slightly nonsensical Eight for Silver.) Writer/director Sean Ellis (Anthropoid) renders the story a period piece set in rural late-19th-century England, so he can set the eerie tone with lots of candlelight and enough fog to even make Godzilla’s foe Hedorah choke. So yes, it’s moody as heck and, some of you will be happy to hear, sometimes gory as heck too, but are those flourishes enough to push this movie out of the realm of mundane horror fodder?

THE CURSED: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We open in the trenches of World War I: Chemical warfare, gas masks, machine guns. The Germans mow down the Brits, and in the triage tent, a bucket of amputated limbs. One poor British soldier is riddled with gunshot wounds, and the surgeons remove the bullets, plunk, clatter, clatter in the tin dish, but one of them is bigger, more pointed, and seems to be made of silver. Curious. Cut to 35 years earlier, when that man was a boy, Edward (Max Mackintosh), younger brother of Charlotte (Amelia Crouch), son of Seamus (Alistaire Petrie) and Isabelle (Kelly Reilly) Laurent. They’re rich – great big house, servant staff, horses, lots of property. Seamus lords over the land and peasants, and often consults with The Elders, and whenever there are Elders in a situation, it’s never not ominous.

So, the Elders meet to discuss a claim being made for their property, which explains the strange previous scene set in an encampment of Romani nomads, among whom is a medicine-woman type and her partner. She murmurs things and he smelts silver coins into a set of teeth with pronounced canines, the dentures of the damned. Wouldn’t you know it, the holy man among the Elders suggests hiring mercenaries to deal with the Romani, and also wouldn’t you know it, the mercenaries aren’t going to ask them nicely to please get off their lawn. Rather, it’ll involve murder, rape and the cruel torture of our medicine-people. The perpetrators keep their nasty deeds secret, but it’s the kind of secret that’ll come back to bite them, most likely with big teeth to the areas of the neck and/or abdomen.

It begins with all the children in the area experiencing the same vivid nightmares of a gruesome scarecrow (whose origins I won’t reveal) and the aforementioned damned dentures. The Laurent property is surrounded by pea-soup fog and the type of dark abandon-all-hope-ye-who-enter forest that’s perfect for a hideous betoothed something to hide in, all the easier to leap out and not only getcha, but maybe also convert ya to its particular stalking, slinking and attacking lifestyle. And to the scene arrives intrepid pathologist John McBride (Boyd Holbrook), like the shadow of Max von Sydow. McBride has seen this type of thing before, and he knows it’s not a case of bad things happening to good people. No, this type of thing only happens to shitbirds when they’re acting like total butts.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Shades of The Exorcist and The Witch, with a monster that resembles the offspring of Pumpkinhead and the American werewolf who ended up in London.

Performance Worth Watching: It’s hard to pin down this scattered collection of characters, but Reilly – of Yellowstone fame – leaves an impression with her portrayal of a concerned mother trapped in a loveless marriage and it’s mildly disappointing that she never kindles a romance with the dashing pathologist.

Memorable Dialogue: “How many of you have dreamt about the scarecrow and the silver teeth?” – Timmy (Tommy Rodger) asks for a show of hands among his fellow haunted children

Sex and Skin: Some brief female nudity.

Our Take: I don’t want to spoil anything about The Cursed, because you should be underwhelmed by its reveals just like I was. So I’ll just say I have some questions about the anatomy of the monster and the logistics of one falling into one of those traps with a few light branches covering a pit full of spikes. This scene occurs about halfway through the movie, the point where its suspenseful intensity clashes mightily with a case of the whogivesashits fostered by its vague mystical black-magic “rules” and lack of a solid point-of-view.

The screenplay has a curiously scattered structure that constantly shifts from the perspectives of the boy, his sister, his mother, his father, a housemaid, the pathologist and a couple others. None emerges as a fully formed character. The pathologist is framed as the hero, a man with a tragic past who shows up late to the narrative and never comes to fruition as the person the story needs – the person exuding competence, confidence and a moral imperative. We get frustratingly brief glimpses into the hearts of McBride and Isabelle, who end up in the same damn old situation at the movie’s dramatic apex: in a burning building, protecting a child, running from a heavy-breathing drooling creature, etc. This leads to an climax that’s a mess of blurry images and herky-jerky photography, a bewildering display of incompetence and budget limitations.

Which is too bad, because Ellis otherwise churns up a murky stew of atmosphere that’s cribbed heavily from Robert Eggers’ The Witch, but is nonetheless effective. But I also felt conflicted, because the wheezy old cliche of a person walking… slowly… through… the house… is always the same whether it’s a person walking… slowly… through… the house… with a cell phone, flashlight or candelabra. The latter just looks slightly cooler, which pretty much sums up The Cursed. Oh, and to reiterate, it can be extravagantly gory, for no reason, it seems, than to delight splatter fiends; you know who you are.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Some turn-the-fog-machine-up-to-11-and-rip-the-knob-off style doesn’t go far enough for The Cursed, which ultimately is little more than a rote creature feature.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

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