"Cursed" (2024) [Festival de Cannes' Marché du Film]

by Joseph Perry and Mike Imboden

In our “The Good, the Bad, and the Verdict” film reviews, Joseph and Mike give their thoughts on a slice of cinema. For this installment, it’s Spanish horror anthology Cursed, by Carlos Marbán and from Red Owl Films.

Synopsis

The lives of six girls belonging to different worlds are connected to each other through a doll named Molly, whose existence dates back to 1976 when she appeared among the rubble of the great fire of the San Carlos orphanage in northern Spain.

The Good

Joseph: Writer/director Carlos Marbán’s Cursed is a pretty wild horror anthology. You get plenty of “bad little girls” action including a surprising amount of swearing and youngsters-on-adults violence. The first two segments are ghostly/demonic possession stories with plots that feel rather tame compared with the two segments that follow: the absolutely bonkers sci-fi–tinged “Level 32” story is straight out of an X-Men/mutants-vs.-an-evil-shadowy-entity playbook with preteen girls getting violent using psychic and physical power, and a zombie segment that has some real intensity to it. Most of the young cast members deliver impressive performances and a few over-the-top performances just add to the zany fun, and Marbán paces things well, upping the intensity from segment to segment and never letting a story drag on too long — a wise move as the film is just over 52 minutes running time before closing credits.

Mike: Anthologies can be a tough sell and generally rely on their first and final chapters to set a tone and end on a high note with weaker chapters sandwiched in-between. Cursed bucks this trend by starting rather weakly but picking up speed and quality for its final two installments, both of which I liked a lot and would have sat through feature length films built around them alone.

The acting was better than average, especially when you consider that most of the young actresses were asked to do some very adult things like shoot guns, kill people, and generally cause some pretty gnarly carnage.

Director Carlos Marbán does a good job building appropriate amounts of tension in the right places within each chapter and allows each one to unfold at a pace that feels just about perfect for the story it has to tell.

The Bad

Joseph: For the opening segment, it seems a bit puzzling that no one hears a girl’s loud screams in a large orphanage. The introduction states “based on true events” but that’s hard to buy into considering the “Level 32” and zombie segments. Finally, the cursed Molly doll — the supposed frame of this film — is somewhat of a MacGuffin.

Mike: The biggest fault that Cursed has going against it, aside from its weak opening segments, is that the overarching story of the cursed “Molly Doll” never seems to be that important and is really more of a MacGuffin than any type of real plot element aside from the second chapter in which it’s actually acknowledged by the characters.

The Verdict

Joseph: Overall, Cursed gets a recommendation from me for its brash chutzpah in showing wicked little-girl characters causing all kinds of bloody harm to themselves and others. Aficionados of evil-kids genre cinema will certainly want to seek out this Spanish shocker.

Mike: Considering the weak opening two chapters which lulled me into a false sense of “this isn’t going to be very good”, the third and fourth chapters saved things with both being much more entertaining both in tone and plot. Overall, the juxtaposition of sweet looking little tween girls kicking all sorts of butt is what really made this for me, although some of the violence by the pint-sized wildlings could toe the line of going over the top for some people.

Aside from a few minor faults, Cursed is an entertaining - albeit rather short - anthology worthy of a watch.