Review of The Cured (2017) by Allan C — 06 Aug 2018

Zombies are probably even more played out than superhero movies at this point, but "The Cured" by Irish writer/director David Freyne manages to find a new angle on the horror subgenera. This film takes place after a zombie outbreak Ireland and scientists have been successful in curing the infected, allowing them to return to their previous lives.

However, those who have been cured still have all the memories of what they did when they were flesh eating zombies and must deal with the horrors they committed. The uninfected human populate also remembers what the former zombies did and treat the perfectly normal cured with disdain, hatred, and systematic discrimination.

There are some flashbacks to the world during the zombie outbreak, but this is not a zombie film in the traditional sense. The former zombies are the sympathetic characters of the film and it's the humans who are the despicable villains of the story, through their cruel and unfair treatment of the cured, that is except for Ellen Page, who plays the sister of the film's main protagonist zombie who we follow from his initial release back into society to the film's climax when (SPOILER ALERT!) the oppressed cured zombies fight back and released a hoard of crazed uncured zombies.

"The Cured" is a story about discrimination and what oppressed groups deal with and how they reach an eventual breaking point. Writer/director Freyne's zombie attack at the end of the film recall images of Ireland's "The Troubles," with cars burning, people running, police shooting.

The zombie action looks more like the Watts Riots news coverage than it does "Night of the Living Dead." Overall, "The Cured" is a smart zombie film that demonstrated for me that the zombie storytelling well has not yet run dry, and that the living dead are a more durable of storytelling vehicle for original stories and exploring topical issues than I had thought.