Get ready to embrace one of the most atmospheric and intelligent horror films of recent years in the form of THE CURSE OF AUDREY EARNSHAW.
A rural Irish Protestant community remains consistent to the period in which it decided not to embrace progress anymore. In 1956, a woman called Agatha Earnshaw (Catherine Walker) gives birth to a child, Audrey, but decides to hide the child away from the community and raises her in secret. In 1973, where this story takes place, the death of a child is the start off point for a series of mysterious deaths and instances that threaten to tear the community apart.
Audrey (Jessica Reynolds), naturally being the inquisitive and determined teenager she has now become, becomes a rebel against her mother’s wishes – and begins to use an unorthodox power to get revenge on the people who have done her mother wrong in the past, particularly a husband and wife, Seamus and Bridget Dwyer (Sean McGInley and Hannah Emily Anderson, WHAT KEEPS YOU ALIVE)
Setting the film amidst a harvest in 1973 around the time of the original blockbuster release of William Friedkin’s legendary horror classic THE EXORCIST is one of the virtues of writer/director Thomas Robert Lee’s film that is everything one hoped M. Night Shyalaman’s THE VILLAGE could have been, but wasn’t.
There is so much visual richness and depth to everything in THE CURSE OF AUDREY EARNSHAW that horror fans have been crying out for this type of movie for a long, long time, evoking the sort of reaction one got when watching other 1970s classic horrors like THE OMEN and Robin Hardy’s original cult classic THE WICKER MAN that have passed into iconic horror status because of their very intent and nature.
The bond between Agatha and Audrey is reminiscent of the mother-daughter bond that defined Brian De Palma’s original 1976 adaptation of the classic Stephen King novel CARRIE, played to near-perfection by Piper Laurie and Sissy Spacek, but here it is the daughter that dominates to a more heightened belief and faith. Refreshingly the film takes its’ time to develop its’ ideas and principles, yielding a bit more patience in audiences who have grown tired of immediate opening shocks a la FRIDAY THE 13TH or any number of stalk and slashes.
THE CURSE OF AUDREY EARNSHAW has everything that horror fans could want – and could also be the perfect choice for those who are looking for something within a genre that perhaps they would like to see out as an alternative to rom-coms or thrillers.
