The Cursed

The audience could be the ones cursed by watching this
dir: Sean Ellis
2022
When this was initially going to come out, probably pre-covid, it was going to be called Eight for Silver. When it played festivals and such it was still called that. But then someone had the brainstorm, the lightbulb moment, the epiphany, and thought "fuck that, that’s too complicated; let's just call it The Cursed".
I think they could have gone one better and called it "How's that Curse I Cursed You With, Cursedy?"
I have lines when it comes to horror flicks, that I am uncomfortable about when they get crossed. It's important to have boundaries, I feel. And while I am generally okay with all sorts of damage and dismemberment, I'm not at all comfortable with having kids as protagonists upon whom carnage is visited. Sure, kids are threatened all the time in action flicks and other horror flicks.
Rarely do they make good on that threat. I think that's partly why I felt a bit aggrieved watching this flick, because they "broke" the social contract of horror flicks that it's okay to put them in peril, but not to actually follow through.
Another of this flick's crimes is that a central part of its story depends on a massacre of a Roma clan, who have the temerity to be on some land that some landlord jerk believes is his. Of course, beyond the supernatural, it is right and proper to make landgrabbing murderers the true villains in anything, whether it's a film or a documentary, but haven't the Roma suffered enough? Such massacres happened for centuries prior to the main "last" time they were slaughtered en masse by the Nazis, but using such a scene - for mass entertainment - worries me a bit, especially with the rise in nationalism / fascism worldwide lately.
Just this week in Britain the Tories brought in legislation targeting the travelers / Roma communities, so can we stop giving them persecution ideas?
Not that I think a fuckwit of Boris Johnstonian proportions would have the time to sit through a deftly-made horror flick like this one.
Even though everyone except the so-called “gypsies” speaks in English and they’re all English (or in the lead’s case, American, I think this is set in France. No-one speaks French, though, which is a relief.