MOVIE DETAILS
Rating: 4.5 out of 10
Director: Christopher Cain
Writer: Robert Mark Kamen, Mark Lee
Star: Pat Morita, Hilary Swank, Michael Ironside
Genres: Action/Drama/Family/Romance/Sport
Release Date: September 9, 1994 (United States)
David Freyne, for his first full-length feature as a writer and director, has come up with the perfect idea: one of those things that are so beautifully simple that it annoys people for not having thought of it. (Because they’re not actually simple to think up.) While countless previous horror movies have just given audiences more tales of our friends and family members turning into mindless flesh-eating zombies, “The Cured” imagines a world where this is indeed a virus one that’s been cured. It’s set in Ireland; the world is ours.
It opens on a bloody sneaker and heavy breathing from a young man whose face takes on an increasingly bloodthirsty expression. This is Senan (Sam Keeley), and he’s great: Some quick visions of his former self assail him in flashbacks and nightmares; now he’s been injected and hospitalized until he became normal again. There’s still a ring of blood around the lower white of his eye, marking what he used to be. He and other cured are released into the general population under observation by a military man who’d rather not be doing this. Protesters don’t trust them. The cured, or at least some of them, don’t trust themselves either: They can remember what they did, especially what Senan did.
Still, Senan has somewhere to go: the home of Abbie (Ellen Page), his sister-in-law and an American journalist who was married to Senan’s brother. She welcomes him along with her little boy; most aren’t so lucky. Conor seems frail and gentle upon release; there seems to be some bond between him and Senan expressed through close physical contact. Conor used to be a successful lawyer, but now he works as something like a trash collector because his family won’t have him back although as Conor tries to bring Senan into an insurrectionist group while also insinuating himself into Abbie’s life, he becomes increasingly forceful, and there’s a particularly vivid performance here by Tom Vaughan-Lawlor.
In the meantime, within a healthcare and penal institution, survivors are known as “the impervious” people who have contracted the virus but cannot be cured and they’re being eradicated by the government. The creator of the cure must hurry to synthesize a new version of it, partly to save her lover from certain death. Senan signs up as a medical assistant there because the infected never attack each other and still recognize a cured person as one of their own. This glitch gives rise to all sorts of interesting plot complications and loopholes. Also in Freyne’s wheelhouse are ideas from George A. Romero’s “Dead” series particularly those about undead intelligence evolution posited in “Day of the Dead.”
The result is an extremely creepy, suspenseful story that also happens to be a better-than-average character study. (As you might surmise, given that I said it was set in Ireland.) So much potential for allegory! So many opportunities for metaphor! Freyne knows what he’s doing here; his world-creation (cities postered with PDAs on how to respond to what’s called “The Maze Virus”) doesn’t lay things on too thick, but they don’t skimp either: The trust/distrust thing; history; personal conscience all points hit with satisfying directness. Eventually something has to give between these characters and their individual situations and this is when the movie becomes its most conventionally movie-ish, with riots and chases and near-misses in the bit-by-one-of-the-infected department. It’s familiar but it works.
And then there are those last shots which have such a nice sting in them! For sure keep watching David Freyne! No doubt 2018 will see some genre movies try to top “The Cured.”
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