Genre Drama

The Curse (2014)

Item: The Curse
Rating: 0.5
Author: Ross McLaren

½ — The Curse (2014)

Right, let's get this out of the way early: The Curse (2014) is one of the worst films I've sat through in recent memory. Half a star, and I'm being generous.

I came to this one through the green map challenge, for those who don't know it, a personal project of mine where I try to watch at least one film from every country in the world. It's a brilliant way to discover cinema you'd never stumble across otherwise, and it's led me to some genuinely wonderful stuff I'd never have found on my own. But it's also the reason I occasionally end up in front of something like this. You take the rough with the smooth. This was very, very rough.

Where do you even start? The acting is painful. Not charmingly rough around the edges, not endearingly amateur, just genuinely, consistently bad in a way that makes it almost impossible to engage with anything happening on screen. Every scene feels like a first take that nobody thought to redo. The scripting isn't any better either. Dialogue lands with a thud, scenes go nowhere, and the whole thing has the feel of something assembled in a hurry by people who hadn't quite decided what kind of film they were making.

And the technical quality, the actual craft of putting images and sound together in a watchable way, falls well below the standard I'd expect from pretty much anything else I've reviewed on this blog. I've seen low-budget films that crackle with energy and invention. I've watched micro-budget productions that use their limitations cleverly. This doesn't do any of that. It just looks and sounds like nobody was especially bothered. There's a kind of indifference baked into every frame.

I want to be fair here, because I do think there's something worth saying about the challenge of reviewing films made in different contexts, with different resources and different filmmaking traditions behind them. I try to approach every country's cinema on its own terms. But "low budget" or "different tradition" can only explain so much. Bad writing is bad writing. Flat, unconvincing performances are flat and unconvincing regardless of where you're watching from. The Curse doesn't fail because of its limitations. It fails because the fundamentals aren't there.

It's a shame, because the green map challenge has genuinely opened my eyes to so much. I've had wonderful surprises through it, films I never would have sought out that turned out to be extraordinary. This is not one of those films. Not even close.

I've seen horror done on a shoestring and done brilliantly, like with The Witch (2015), where atmosphere and commitment to the material do all the heavy lifting that a bigger budget might otherwise provide. The Curse has none of that. No atmosphere, no commitment, no sense that anyone behind the camera had a clear vision of what they wanted to say or how they wanted to say it.

If you're doing the green map challenge yourself, I genuinely wish you luck when you hit this one. Take a deep breath, pour yourself something strong, and remember it'll be over eventually. Half a star.

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

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