‘The Accursed’ Review: An Unbalanced Brew of Tension and Talent

The Accursed - Feature
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In the film, an important factor that isn’t often discussed is balance. A balanced film dances from scene to scene, creating its own rhythm that lulls audiences into accepting the unbelievable events on screen. It’s this unconscious cadence that suspends our disbelief. It comes from a mix of scene length, dialogue, exposition, editing (both sound and music), and character. When these elements are mixed into a brew, it casts that magical spell called cinema. 

But if you get the measurements wrong, you’ll curse your audience into watching an unbalanced film. So it’s quite fitting that The Accursed (2022) chose this title for its unbalanced plot. With a little less than half the film delivering spooky, gruesome delights, a majority favors cheap mystery and shrug-worthy scares. 

The Accursed kicks off with the thoroughbred tension of rotting apples and crucifix tree carvings. Alexis Knapp’s Mary Ann tells her young companion, “Don’t come inside until the screaming starts.” It’s the first line of dialogue, dripping with a kind of cheesy intrigue that should allow you to sink into the horrors to come. The cold open is delightful, showcasing the wickedly talented Meg Foster (They Live, Lords of Salem, 31) in all her blue-eyed glory as backwoods witch Ms. Ambrose. A swerve and swallow of a demon later, we’re thrown away from Mary Ann and her weird little daughter to introduce protagonist Elly (Sarah Grey)… and it all goes downhill from there. 

The Accursed
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One would hope director Kevin Lewis’s follow-up to his irreverent Willy’s Wonderland would be equally as captivating. Even with a simple premise, Lewis created a monstrous and mysterious world where the rules didn’t matter, and nothing was expected. He would be the perfect choice to bring a script like The Accursed to screen. 

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Like Willy’s Wonderful, the film centers on an outsider main character thrown into an arcane plot in which she is the central sacrifice. Returning to her childhood home after her mother passes away, nurse Elly receives a call from Alma (Mena Suvari) to come take care of her comatose ward, Ms. Ambrose. As days pass, Elly is confronted with mucus, blood-yolked eggs, and nightmare visions of her dead mum. It seems there’s a demon inside of Ms. Ambrose (that can happen after you ingest your own curse), and Elly has been chosen to take up its mantle. 

Screenwriter Rob Kennedy has a long relationship with short films, the only exception being The Midnight Man (2013), which was adapted from his short film of the same title. That’s exactly where The Accursed finds itself. It’s a short trapped in an hour-and-thirty-six-minute runtime. Or perhaps it fits best as a piece of a television horror anthology. The entrancing title credits sequence (a True Blood meets Dexter sharp cuts meets ominous music formula) certainly feels like that’s where it belongs. With the exception of the opening and final act, it’s a slog of semi-creepy visions that never really capture the horror of Elly’s situation. 

The Accursed
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That’s not really true. There are several mysteries inside the story that are gasping to get out. It’s just too bad once the film catches its breath; it spills all the beans in paroxysms of exposition. Elly’s friend Beth (Sarah Dumont) serves as audience stand-in and exposition dumping ground as she digs into the backwoods history of Ms. Ambrose and her daughter, Dorothy. Mary Ann shows up for a walk-and-talk with Elly to explain why she plans to burn Ms. Ambrose’s house down. The dialogue struggles throughout, with far too many explanations and exorcisms that sound like emo high school poetry. It’s as though Kennedy doesn’t trust the audience to figure things out on their own. 

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The Accursed is an exercise in when a potentially good movie is broken because of small choices. It broke my brain when police officer Holly demanded a bloody Elly go back into the house she’s just escaped from. Clearly, this woman is in danger; why are you sending her back into the lion’s den? It throws a viewer outside of suspending disbelief because we’re too hung up on the disconnect. Sometimes the smallest mistake can destroy believability. 

Elly herself is a confused character, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Grey’s lackluster performance is just a symptom of not having fleshed-out development. She’s a nurse with little-to-know nursing skills and misplaces her cell phone multiple times to the point where it can be considered a major plot point, but its only purpose seems to be that her friend cannot contact her when she needs to. Better movies solve this with the simple “there’s no service out here in this woodland cabin.” Instead, we’re continually reminded that Elly is kind of cell phone scatterbrained, just in case we forget. 

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As Elly uncovers the baffling link between her mother and Ms. Ambrose, the nightmare visions just aren’t enough to make us care. But we’ve been told to care; the idea of abandoning her own mother is somehow paralleled in Ms. Ambrose being left by her daughter Dorothy. But things just keep happening to Elly, and she’s never given the emotional freedom to show us that we should care about her internal struggle. 

This could also be because of the completely wasted talent surrounding her. Meg Foster gives a startling introduction followed by spending far too long unresponsive in bed, occasionally quivering and spitting up demon hands. Her mere presence has an unsettling fury that is squandered by lifelessness. Mena Suvari is equally missing for most of the film, only to steal every moment as the climax comes to fruition. Her crazed, creepy Alma demands your attention every time she appears. It’s too bad she’s barely around. Knowing these women are even in the film lends itself to impatiently nail-tapping as we lumber through Elly’s befuddled story. 

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Some interesting stylistic choices include flash cuts straight out of torture porn and the determined use of practical effects. But the film is still polished with slick varnish, lacking a substantive grit necessary for the backwoods black magic it’s trying to convey. Witches have clearly gone the way of crystals and pumpkin spice, where we could use some bone-rattling and bloodshed. The most cursed thing in this film is a line of dialogue, with Elly’s ghost mom stating they’ll be “best friends till the end,” that does nothing but remind audiences that season 2 of USA’s Chucky is coming out soon. 

The Accursed is a milk-toast slice of raw meat that hasn’t been properly tenderized. In a world where we need more solid “witch calls forth the demon” stories (let’s face it, Netflix’s cancellation of Marianne left a hole), The Accursed fails to give us characters to root for or mysteries we can solve. It flirts with great ideas and an engaging premise, something that would be suitable for something shorter, but in its attempt to fill a feature runtime, it’s unbalanced. 

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I am excited to see more features from Kennedy, and perhaps partnering with Kevin Lewis will help build his trust in audiences. He clearly has good ideas about genre flicks and story. He just needs to let go of his characters and let them duke it out with the evil he creates on their own. 

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