Writer/director Sean Ellis’s werewolf movie The Cursed, which premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival under the (far superior) title Eight for Silver, begins rather unassumingly for a period horror movie: we’re thrown into the trenches of the First World War, as a cloud of mustard gas descends upon a crowd of French troops. One of the soldiers is taken to a field hospital where his wounds are attended to, and a bullet is pulled from his chest curiously not of German make or model.
We’re left to puzzle this out-of-context question as we’re taken back twenty-five years to rural France, as the property of land baron Seamus Laurent (Alistair Petrie) is occupied by a non-threatening Romani clan who purports to have a claim to the land as well. Laurent mercilessly slaughters them, unknowingly unleashing a curse on his family and their village.
