The Cursed is a foggy, sluggish variation on the old-school werewolf movie

Although The Cursed is set in France, it’s so gray that you might assume it takes place in England. That’s no slight against the British—they’ll be the first to tell you that their homeland is a foggy, overcast place. Would they feel at home in the colorless countryside of this monster movie, which at times almost appears to be shot in black-and-white, with only the red-orange glow of an angry villager’s torch lighting up the somber color palette? (The Cursed is big on mobs of angry villagers.) The English accents further confuse the matter, as does the film’s resemblance to the stuffed-shirt Gothic period pieces that were once specialties of British studios like Amicus and Hammer.

We open against the hellish backdrop of a WWI foxhole, where a soldier is lifted onto an operating table, blood gushing from multiple ammunition wounds. As a French army doctor begins the delicate work of extracting metal from flesh, he finds something unusual embedded deep in the man’s chest: a silver bullet. Cut to a title card reading “35 years earlier.” Now we’re watching the story of village elders who bring some well-deserved hell down on themselves by slaughtering a band of Roma families with a legitimate claim on their land.

Putting on our “all horror is metaphor” glasses for a moment, the political reading of that particular plot line is obvious. Imagery of bloodthirsty maids attacking wealthy landowners should be the stuff of a George Romero-style allegory about the downtrodden rising up to destroy their masters. But writer-director Sean Ellis is so focused on constructing an old-fashioned Gothic tale that he doesn’t seem to have noticed the rich subtextual gift he’s given himself. Not that The Cursed is totally oblivious to its themes. Early on, it explicitly points out this is the tale of children paying for the sins of their parents.

Once it gets around to setting up the core cast of characters, led by village boss Seamus (Alistair Petrie), his wife Isabelle (Kelly Reilly), and their children, Charlotte (Amelia Crouch) and Edward (Max Mackintosh), The Cursed settles into a narrative groove that re-states the same ideas and events until they get quite stale indeed. The addition of pathologist/monster hunter John McBride (Boyd Holbrook) helps, in the sense that Victorian science is always fascinating. Holbrook is an interesting actor as well, although the role, a standard Van Helsing type, isn’t especially layered or surprising.

In between scenes of self-satisfied patriarchs huffing and puffing by candlelight, The Cursed does bring some modern elements to its tale. The gore effects are alternately realistic (think bloody skin flaps and spurting arteries) and fantastic, with an emphasis on creature design. Not quite werewolves and not quite demons, with a mixture of mammalian and insectoid characteristics, the monsters in this film bring to mind Rob Bottin’s landmark effects work on John Carpenter’s The Thing. They’re startling when we get brief glimpses of them, and pretty damn cool when we get a long, sticky look. The cursed silver fangs that kickstart the supernatural happenings are also appealingly designed, although they don’t pop against the film’s murky background.

Even when Ellis ramps up the suspense with crosscutting and monster mayhem in the final half-hour, The Cursed has trouble maintaining nail-biting intensity for very long. Most of the characters are shuffled off screen to hide out in a church for the second half of the movie. And those that do stay involved in the narrative don’t have defined-enough emotional arcs to make us care much about their fates. When it comes to homage, loving attention to craft can take you most but not all of the way. The Cursed proves that.