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Stars: Boyd Holbrook, Kelly Reilly, Alistair Petrie, Roxane Duran, Nigel Betts, Simon Kunz, Stuart Bowman, Amelia Crouch, Max Mackintosh, Tommy Rodger, Mine Rose Daly, Millie Kiss | Written and Directed by Sean Ellis

Eight for Silver is a horror movie that was originally released in 2021 under the title The Cursed. Directed by Sean Ellis, it stars Boyd Holbrook, Kelly Reilly, and Alistair Petrie and takes place in the late 19th century, centring around a small village in France where a series of brutal murders have taken place. The locals are convinced that a pack of wolves is responsible for the killings, but a British pathologist, John McBride (Holbrook), arrives to investigate and discovers that something far more sinister is at play.

One of the strengths of Eight for Silver is its visual style. The movie is shot in a dark, atmospheric manner that perfectly captures the eerie and foreboding mood of the story.

After their father, a cold-hearted land baron, ruthlessly slaughters a camp of Romani who staked a claim to his land, young Charlotte (Amelia Crouch) and Edward (Max Mackintosh) begin to have ominous dreams of a human scarecrow and silver teeth. The dreams draw them and other children from the nearby village to the site of the massacre, and soon after, Edward goes missing. The discovery of grisly remains attracts the attention of a grief-stricken pathologist (Boyd Holbrook), who suspects something supernatural is lurking in the surrounding forest and vows to hunt it down and destroy it.

A brooding period horror, The Cursed is a compelling story, effectively told. Opening with a tantalising prologue set during the Battle of the Somme - in which an army surgeon extracts several bullets from an injured soldier before discovering a silver bullet that had already been inside him - writer and director Sean Ellis has created an.

Sundance 2021 has been filled with so many movies about—and made in—the current pandemic that a 19th-century, gory genre flick feels like a return to normalcy. Then again, Eight for Silver, a new werewolf gothic written and directed by Sean Ellis, is still focused on the containment of spreading diseases. A cholera outbreak surrounds this beastly saga while family members vanish mysteriously and inhuman transformations multiply with each passing day. The specter of death hovers in the dark, foggy air, the product of cursed land and religious prophecy and other mythical elements packed into this engaging if only partially-conceived horror.

It’s not the movie you expect to see based on its prologue. Beginning in the trenches of World War I during the Battle of Somme, the camera glides over army ranks preparing to charge from their bunkers while battling explosions of mustard gas burning holes through their uniforms.

At its core, the grim, gritty and blood-soaked “Eight for Silver” is a skillfully fashioned yet philosophically thin twist on the werewolf saga. And yet, in the opening moments of Sean Ellis’ dark-hued and gory gothic horror, you might briefly mistake the monster-themed film you’re about to watch for Sam Mendes’ “1917,” with Ellis’ stylish camera cruising ahead through a crammed trench of masked French soldiers, about to be fatally hit by the mustard gas. It’s a gut-wrenching moment, made even more violent when Edward, among the attack’s bullet-wounded victims, reaches a hospital tent in the next scene, a grubby place replete with merciless buckets of amputated limbs and the screaming bodies from which they’ve been separated. Edward doesn’t survive the “Battle of the Somme,” but an unusually large silver bullet plucked from his body — “not a German bullet,” we overhear — gets sent home to...