Genre Drama

The Curse (2014)

Item: The Curse
Rating: 0.5
Author: Ross McLaren

½ — The Curse (2014)

Cinema from Kiribati is, to put it mildly, a rare thing. The Pacific island nation, spread across more than thirty coral atolls in the central Pacific, has produced almost no narrative feature films for international audiences, which makes The Curse (2014) something of a curiosity in world cinema, however modest its production. The film comes from Flying Fish Productions and was co-produced between Kiribati and the United States, with direction credited to Eric Larson. At 112 minutes, it is a proper feature-length effort, blending drama and comedy around a premise that sounds, on the surface, like warm and colourful folk storytelling: a young man from a village must prove that a generations-old curse on the men of his family has been lifted, the proof being success in a local dance competition, before he is permitted to marry the woman he loves. The twist, when it arrives, reframes that supernatural premise as something rooted in real social harm, with alcoholism revealed as the true "curse" at the heart of the family line. It is the kind of subject matter that could, handled with care, carry genuine weight, particularly given the broader context of alcohol-related problems documented in Pacific island communities. If you are curious about cinema actually made in and around Kiribati, the documentary Kiribati: Words From a Last Generation is also worth a look, covering a very different register but sharing the same small nation as its backdrop.

The cast, led by Tokanuea Atanimarewe, Aneteti Atanteiti, Kirannata Aukitino, and Bwarenti Bakoauea, are not names recognisable to most Western audiences, and the film makes no pretence of being a polished commercial production. There is something inherently worthwhile, in principle, about filmmaking that emerges from communities rarely represented on screen at all, and the dance competition at the story's centre does at least give the film a local cultural anchor. What the production cannot claim, however, is the kind of technical or dramatic infrastructure that tends to carry an ambitious premise through to a satisfying conclusion. For a point of comparison in small-scale drama filmmaking from the same era, the blog's coverage of Mustang offers a sense of what a limited-resource production can achieve when the scripting and direction are pulling in the same direction, and Yi Yi remains a benchmark on this site for what drama can accomplish when it trusts its material. The Curse, unfortunately, had an uphill task from the outset, and the question for any viewer going in is whether good intentions and a genuinely rare national cinema can compensate for the limitations on screen.

I watched this initially purely for the green map challenge but it is sadly an absolutely awful movie. The acting, scripting, quality etc... it's all just so bad compared to practically anything else I've watched.

I came to this one as part of the green map challenge, ticking off Kiribati as a cinematic territory, and that context is probably the only frame in which I can imagine recommending anyone seek it out. It is the kind of film where you find yourself rooting for the concept more than anything actually happening on screen, and that goodwill only gets you so far across 112 minutes. If you want to explore other small-scale productions from the 2010s that actually land, my review of Luigi covers another low-profile production from roughly the same period that might sit better. Sometimes the map fills in, and sometimes the film is just a box ticked.

Rating: ½ | Year: 2014 | Watched: 2025-07-04

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