The Undead Lives Again in Highly-Visceral Post-Zombie Movie “The Cured”

The much-anticipated (94% in Rotten Tomatoes) horror-thriller movie “The Cured” starring Ellen Page (“X-Men” films, “Inception,” “Juno”) sees a post-zombie world as an antidote is finally found and brings zombies back to life after a virus turned them into cannibals.

In “The Cured,” the treated zombies are brought back to an unforgiving society that is not willing to give them a second chance. The movie traces back to writer-director David Freyne’s short film entitled “The First Wave”about an outbreak of a zombie virus that introduced a possible cure. From this short film now comes his full-length feature “The Cured” that follows Senan (Sam Keeley), a young man who is now haunted by the horrific acts he committed while infected. As he tries to restart his life along his widowed sister-in-law Abi (Page), Senan soon finds himself in an angry world not willing to give second chances to the cured.

From recent interviews with director Freyne, the filmmaker shared about how the concept of fear helped developed the film, “It started with the idea of what it would be like to be haunted with memories of what you did, but seeing it through trapped eyes [because] you weren’t in control. And then it was about how fear is exploited in the world at the moment, how anger is exploited in the world at the moment by people for their own ends. And how quickly you can go backwards.”

“The Cured” has so far received initial rave reviews during its early preview at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), including from The Hollywood Reporter, stating that “This may be one of the first horror movies where you may wind up preferring the zombies over actual people, who can be the real hell.”

Likewise, Variety chimed in, “Just when you thought nothing new could be done with the undead, The Cured pulls off a fresh take on zombie terrain”; and Kerri Craddock from TIFF also expressed that the movie is glorious zombie flick, “Like any great zombie flick, The Cured works on several levels: it’s a gloriously terrifying horror-thriller packed with enough jump scares to satisfy genre fans, yet it also displays an intellect and heart that provoke empathy even as it takes aim at the ways in which humans beings fail each other.”

A jump-out-of-your-seat thriller, “The Cured” opens February 28 in cinemas nationwide from Axinite Digicinema.