I am a big fan of zombie movies, and have enjoyed many different takes on the genre. The Cured is a new one, starting at the point after a zombie apocalypse where many of the infected have been cured, and are being reintegrated into society. The film is set in Ireland, and the zombie premise serves as allegory for a variety of conflicts between segments of society.
Ellen Page stars as Abbie, a reporter and single mother, whose husband was killed during the outbreak. Sam Kelley is Senan, Abbie's husband's brother, one of the Cured, whom she has agreed to take in as a condition of his release. The Cured remember everything they did while infected, and of course the uninfected do as well, and the reintegration is not going well. Themes of alienation, otherness, family, discrimination and betrayal are nicely woven together, and the violence seethes below the surface for most of the film, kept alive by Senan's flashbacks of what he did while infected.
This is a pretty good film, but not the best zombie film I've seen - for example not as excellent as last year's The Girl With All The Gifts.
With about half an hour left in the film, and at an especially critical moment ("What happened to Luke?"), fire alarms went off in the Ryerson Theatre, and we had to evacuate. After maybe half an hour milling around on the sidewalk outside the theatre, and with the lineup for the next film waiting beside us, we were readmitted and asked to return to our original seats. A TIFF spokesman got on stage, and apologized for the disruption. The film was restarted a minute or two before the interruption, the Q&A still took place after the film, and we were told we would each receive a credit for another screening in our online TIFF accounts to make up for the disruption. A very classy way to handle the problem, TIFF!
TIFF 2017 Overview
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