'Curse of Audrey Earnshaw' drenches coming-of-rage horror tale in dread
“The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw” - ★ ★ ★
Atmospheric horror tales such as Thomas Robert Lee's “The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw” give us the willies by pushing us into a frightening free fall — we have no idea what horrible event will happen next, and we lack those reassuring cliches employed by lesser films to help guide us along.
“The Curse” contains plot points reminiscent of Roman Polanski's bleak horror classic “Rosemary's Baby,” but bears a stronger resemblance to Robert Eggers' “The Witch,” a bold experiment in ominous dread set in the year 1630.
Although the story here takes place during 1973 in an unnamed rural area of North America, it sure appears as if it could be 1630. The color-starved cinematography (exquisitely rendered by Nick Thomas) and the absence of many modern conveniences supply Lee's story with an eerie sense of timelessness.
A prologue tells us that after a mysterious eclipse in 1956, pestilence, suffering and death seized this small community, poisoning the soil and causing two-headed calves to be born.
Only the productive farm belonging to Agatha Earnshaw (Catherine Walker) has been magically spared. The superstitious locals suspect she might be in league with dark forces.
They don't know — but we do — that Agatha gave birth to a daughter during that eclipse 17 years earlier. Agatha has kept Audrey (Jessica Reynolds, a Disney-grade princess beauty) a secret, for reasons we later understand.
One day while Audrey hides inside a wooden crate on her mom's horse-drawn carriage into town, she witnesses a distraught local named Colm (Jared Abrahamson), whose young son has just died of mysterious causes, slap Agatha in a fit of anguish.
“Everyone knows what you are!” he snaps at her.
Up to this point, we don't. Not for sure.
That abruptly changes when Audrey later chastises her mom for being “weak,” then, against mom's orders, begins her own campaign to avenge what she witnessed.
As Audrey summons forth powers we didn't know she had, “The Curse” whisks us into a cinematic caldron of madness, seduction and death, featuring a coven of witches in white, a spiritually impotent minister and morally compromised men, all as part of a teenage woman coming-of-rage tale on a level not seen since Brian DePalma's “Carrie.”
Like “The Witch,” Lee's horrific folk tale has not been designed as a mass crowd-pleaser.
Huge expository chunks are missing, so we don't know the back stories of Agatha, or Audrey's father, or even the titular character.
Some will think the abrupt ending cheats us out of something we need to see.
“The Curse” throws us into delirious disequilibrium unencumbered by internal logic and the need to connect the dramatic dots.
What we get in “The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw” constitutes an immersive experience in sheer dread, and we must see what evil, awful thing will happen in the next scene, the next shot, the next moment.
For when you're in free fall, you cannot control anything.
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Starring: Jessica Reynolds, Catherine Walker, Jared Abrahamson
Directed by: Thomas Robert Lee
Other: A Gate 67 Films production. In theaters, then on VOD and digital Oct. 6. Not rated; contains violence, coarse language, sexual situations. 94 minutes