There’s a kind of unfortunate cliché that Canadian movies are just American movies but cheaper and less good. It’s not true of course, the best Canadian movies are as unique as any American film -and quite a bit more-so depending on the examples. But not every Canadian filmmaker is an Atom Egoyan or David Cronenberg or Guy Maddin or Zacharias Kunuk or Jasmin Mozafarri. Sometimes the kind of Canadian movies that get seen, the ones deemed more marketable are operating off of trends in other film industries that ours can’t quite replicate. That was the case with Target Number One, even with Indian Horse -which was very good. And The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw is another, a film that wants to be a Canadian stamp on folk horror but has little interesting identity of its own.
The clearest reference point for the film, written and directed by Thomas Robert Lee, is most likely Robert Eggers’ The Witch -possibly the best folk horror film in recent years. It’s got the same settler era aesthetic (if the setting itself is perplexingly much more contemporary), the same focus on Puritan Christian superstition and witchcraft, and even an attempt at the same kind of muted colour grading. And while it does give off an eerie impression at times, a natural mystique oozing out of the displacement of the films’ setting -an Irish Protestant commune in some nameless part of eastern North America- Lee is no Robert Eggers, and has nowhere near the atmospheric intensity or careful dread in his filmmaking.
The script and general storytelling are also a problem, perhaps the films’ biggest. The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw at its core, doesn’t really know what it is trying to convey, and is certainly not scary in the process. It first follows up a long bout of exposition text to show a couple scenes of the titular witch’s mother Agatha (Catherine Walker) being harassed by suspicious locals, her land and crops faring much better than theirs. She and her daughter are established as the chief point of view characters and avatars for audience sympathy, Audrey (Jessica Reynolds) being kept out of sight at all times due to her death having been faked by her coven at an early age. And so these witches are identified as persecuted, distrusted and alienated by the community.
But it’s not long before Lee reveals his hand and openly plays up the psychopathy of Audrey while humanizing the civilians, their beliefs and anxieties. Even the main offender (Jared Abraham) who directly threatened Agatha for trespassing on his sons’ funeral is made to be a much empathetic and traumatized if witless family man -and his wife an innocent victim of her husbands’ perceived transgression. The more screen-time Lee allots to the various villagers and their responses to witchcraft the less relatable and interesting the witches are. It’s very much an intentional move to make the initially apparent victims of prejudice into an actual monstrous force as a kind of subversion, but that comes with some poorly thought out optics. Suddenly it’s good that these witches were ostracized from society, because they’ll respond with chaos and deep evil to a relatively minor altercation. And if the attempt is merely to blur the lines of morality then it fails, because it very quickly escalates out of small revenge on Audrey’s part for one slight, to pandemonium for its own sake because she hates “weakness” or might be the antichrist -an allusion the film would rather you not think about unless you find it clever.
In the end the actual goals of the film are bewilderingly incomprehensible, creative choices made for no reason other than tonal or genre obligation. You need to have some possessed animals in your folk horror after all, and at least one scene of a bunch of naked old people engaging in a pagan ritual. By far the least enticing element in all of this proves to be the witches, who needlessly complicate the narrative trajectory and stand in the way of any real horror. There’s a reason why the titular anomaly of The Witch is ambiguous throughout much of that film. Witchcraft is really only effective as a device in its mysticism -and The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw does away with any of that, not even bothering to come up with new uses for it. Meanwhile, Audrey’s story is characterized as a kind of transformation into a Lady Macbeth agent of chaos, but it’s not textually justified by anything -or at least not what she seems to claim it is.
Credit where it’s due though, the film does manage to be disturbing in moments. There’s a scene where a family eats a disgusting broth and we’re not entirely sure how much their doing so is influenced by Audrey. And though it’s just a recycling of Rosemary’s Baby, the subplot of the mystery pregnancy is the creepiest part of the movie. From the freaky dogtooth Bridget (Hannah Emily Anderson) finds lodged in her mouth, to her slaughtering a sheep and placing its innards in the babys’ cot while cradling its’ head. And the most uncomfortable scene isn’t even one dealing with such supernatural phenomena, but is rather her attempt at a self-induced abortion. Anderson is very good, and the acting is generally fine throughout, though the only real standouts are veterans Don McKellar and Sean McGinley.
But these things fall to the side where The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw is too convoluted, unfocused, and unambitious to be either compelling or scary. An empty horror movie that adds nothing new and leaves no impact on its audience. It is a lesser replica of far greater material, the stereotype of Canadian movies incarnate.
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