The cursed: a high tension film (criticism)

Doubly awarded Gérardmer, a first genre film full of ideas and references, in which it is sometimes lost, but devilishly effective.

It is a film built like a puzzle that leaves spectators the place to complete the gaps that its director voluntarily left a path. A fantastic film- rewarded at the Gérardmer festival with the prizes of criticism and youth- which, in the same logic, prefers to play on the mysterious counter- fields as on the dripping gore of hemoglobin over a story that unfolds between two countries (Spain and Argentina), two epochs (today and twenty years earlier) and three heroines. The famous “cursed” of the title victims of the same strange phenomenon: a threatening presence around it, invisible to the naked eye and of which they are the only ones to hear the terrifying cries. Coming from the clip universe, Pedro Martin-Calero has a scenario co-written by Isabel Peña, longtime accomplice of Rodrigo Sorogoyen (AS BESTAS,, Madre…).

Its staging is teeming with sound as in the image of a thousand ideas (including that which the “monster” becomes visible only by the prism of the objectives of a camera, a surveillance camera or a telephone) and as many references, of Lost Highway has Tesis by the way The tenant. This abundance assumed sometimes plays against the film and pollutes what this toxic transmission of an ancestral curse intends to symbolize: violence against women who are transmitted from generation to generation without being heard or raw. Without ever damaging the tension that deploys it until its last image.

By Pedro Martin-Calero. With Ester Exposito, Mathilde Ollivier, Malena Villa … Duration 1h47. Released May 21, 2025