आलोचक समीक्षाएं

What lifts this Irish film above the “Here they come, SHOOT’em!” trap are the moral dilemmas, the shaky ground underneath either side of those dilemmas and performances that can be downright wrenching in their humanity.

It's a moody horror movie that favors metaphor over mayhem until its violent, chaotic final third, at which point the screaming starts in earnest. A bit more balance between gnawing guilt and plain old gnawing would have done this scare-parable wonders. Its bark is worse than its bite. But you hear every point that bark is making loud and painfully clear.

The Cured suffers from a common marketing problem that afflicts many horror-cross-something hybrids: it’s at times too slow and existential for pure blood and gore lovers and too grotesque for those with a penchant for offbeat, idea-based allegories.

Heartbreaking, compelling and terrifying, The Cured is a quick way to re-examine our capacity for forgiveness, tolerance and above all, fear.

Everyone is extremely serious, which can be a bit of a drag at times, but as a study in trauma The Cured has its moments and the film plays best when it remains intimate.

Freyne obviously intends all this as a grand allegory for refugee crises/immigration politics, but the logic applied to anti-immigration politics simply does not apply to anti-Cured politics. The allegory doesn’t track, and neither does the movie’s internal logic.

Anyone digging through the cemetery soil again had better have fresh ideas. The Cured, the debut feature from David Freyne, has roughly two.

The confluence of rebellion, personal responsibility and genre violence never quite gels, perhaps because the realities of a zombie movie ultimately dictate where these things are headed.

That's a pretty good notion, though nothing comes of it because the first-time filmmaker, David Freyne, has so many undigested ideas on his plate-guilt, innocence, bigotry, forgiveness, atonement and, if you please, a replaying of IRA strife.

Even though The Cured doesn’t quite excel at being both terrifying and thought-provoking, at least it gave Juno the opportunity to become a horror hero.