✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Ireland, France · 2017
Rated R · 1h 35m
Director David Freyne
Starring Elliot Page, Sam Keeley, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Stuart Graham
Genre Drama, Horror, Science Fiction
Please login to add films to your watchlist.
What happens when the undead return to life? In a world ravaged for years by a virus that turns the infected people into zombie-like cannibals, a cure is at last found and so it begins the wrenching process of reintegrating the survivors back into society.
Freyne obviously intends all this as a grand allegory for refugee crises/immigration politics, but the logic applied to anti-immigration politics simply does not apply to anti-Cured politics. The allegory doesn’t track, and neither does the movie’s internal logic.
The New York Times by Ben Kenigsberg
Anyone digging through the cemetery soil again had better have fresh ideas. The Cured, the debut feature from David Freyne, has roughly two.
Village Voice by Craig D. Lindsey
Even though The Cured doesn’t quite excel at being both terrifying and thought-provoking, at least it gave Juno the opportunity to become a horror hero.
It's a moody horror movie that favors metaphor over mayhem until its violent, chaotic final third, at which point the screaming starts in earnest. A bit more balance between gnawing guilt and plain old gnawing would have done this scare-parable wonders. Its bark is worse than its bite. But you hear every point that bark is making loud and painfully clear.
ReelViews by James Berardinelli
The Cured suffers from a common marketing problem that afflicts many horror-cross-something hybrids: it’s at times too slow and existential for pure blood and gore lovers and too grotesque for those with a penchant for offbeat, idea-based allegories.
Wall Street Journal by Joe Morgenstern
That's a pretty good notion, though nothing comes of it because the first-time filmmaker, David Freyne, has so many undigested ideas on his plate-guilt, innocence, bigotry, forgiveness, atonement and, if you please, a replaying of IRA strife.
The Hollywood Reporter by Jordan Mintzer
Everyone is extremely serious, which can be a bit of a drag at times, but as a study in trauma The Cured has its moments and the film plays best when it remains intimate.
Los Angeles Times by Robert Abele
The confluence of rebellion, personal responsibility and genre violence never quite gels, perhaps because the realities of a zombie movie ultimately dictate where these things are headed.
What lifts this Irish film above the “Here they come, SHOOT’em!” trap are the moral dilemmas, the shaky ground underneath either side of those dilemmas and performances that can be downright wrenching in their humanity.
They Come in the Toilet
When society collapses, two sisters take their chances in the wild -- but the forest can be unforgiving.
A teenage sociopath hunts down a serial killer while suppressing his own homicidal tendencies.
In the outback no one can hear you squeal
In rural Ireland, two twins live in their crumbling family estate with a sinister presence known as The Lodgers.
A romance blossoms between widowed neighbors Addie and Louis.
Junior and Hen’s quiet life is interrupted when a man shows up at their door uninvited with a strange proposal.