There were a number of truly excellent films at this year's Fantastic Fest, and I'm only one little writer. We've already reviewed a number of excellent works from Austin already, but we don't have the time or space to give all of them the ample credit that they deserve. So we've brought to you a selection of capsule reviews of some of the titles we saw at the Fest this year- the good, the bad, and the anime -- all in 300-or-so words or less.
No, this isn’t a film about meats on top of a delicious Italian sub, it’s another rote and boring drama about the aftermath of a “zombie apocalypse,” which this time has decided to fuck Ireland as opposed to the US. That doesn’t mean that The Cured doesn’t have room for any North Americans in the cast though; it’s hard to imagine this movie being made and playing this many festivals if it weren’t for Ellen Page, who does her best here to elevate the material she’s given. She’s playing a supporting character here, the sister-in-law of our protagonist, who once was a 28 Days Later-style diseased zombie before he got better, and her decision to house him proves to be one hell of an awkward choice.
There’s a group of fun ideas here — it’s always interesting to imagine the aftermaths of your given world-ending scenario, and a good amount of our time is spent with a former-zombie rights group, protesting their treatment at the hand of the Irish government — though it never congeals into anything meaningful.
You can tell that director David Freyne wants his film to say something, to be meaningful, to be on par with the Romero movies that everybody loves and cites when talking about political genre cinema, but his messages are so muddled and squashed together that they don’t make tonal sense. Perhaps it would have helped if his world-building weren’t utterly generic — there’s only so much graffiti and so many military checkpoints before all of these films start blending together — and his one dramatically interesting idea, that the formerly-infected remember all they did as zombies, is buried under miles of uninteresting drama between Page and her co-stars. Add to that mix a vague and deeply unsatisfying ending, and you get a film that just can’t stack up in a year of truly excellent horror filmmaking.
