The Cursed

A horror film set in rural France in the nineteenth century. A group of Roma people are camped on land a local landowner wants. They have a deed. He gathers the other landowners and has them killed. Before she dies, one of the women buries something and curses the ground. The children of the village start to dream the same dream. One of them digs the thing up. Then a boy goes missing. From there the film becomes an investigation. A pathologist arrives who has seen this before, in another village, and starts opening bodies and asking questions nobody wants asked. What the narrative is interested in is not a monster but debt: what happens is a consequence, the film says so plainly, and the men who benefited are the ones it comes for. The creature is not the usual one. What comes out of the wound is closer to something skinned than to a wolf, and the film keeps it in the dark and in fragments. The silver in the story is not generic silver. It is the thirty pieces from the gospel, melted and reworked, and the curse is built on that. The look is the film's strongest feature: cold blue, deep fog and almost no artificial light in the exteriors. Sean Ellis wrote and directed and also shot it himself, working as his own cinematographer. Boyd Holbrook, Kelly Reilly and Alistair Petrie are in the cast. It premiered at Sundance in 2021 under a different title, Eight for Silver, and was renamed for release. Who it is for: anyone who likes slow, cold folk horror with a strong image. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a fast creature feature; the pace is deliberate and the film opens bodies on screen.