Fantasia Fest 2020: ‘The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw’ drives nails into the heart of morality and faith

“Does that mean you’d sacrifice yourself for me?” Audrey prods her mother Agatha while having tea. It’s one of the more provocative, bone-picking inquires presented throughout The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw, screening at this year’s Fantasia 2020. Written and directed by Thomas Robert Lee (Empyrean), the film splices together haunted folklore, human depravity and morality, and the disenchantment of faith.

Catherine Walker (A Dark Song) plays Agatha, a tortured woman trying to do the right thing and whose deluded moral compass leads her to hide her daughter Audrey (Jessica Reynolds, in her debut film role) away from the rest of the world. Set in 1973, deep within a Protestant village, it has been 17 very long years of poor harvests, a series of unfortunate events, and just plain ole bad luck ⏤ except for Agatha and Audrey, of course, who appear to be absolutely flourishing with vibrant crops and other prized goods. A resentment swells throughout town, and even as fellow farmers and families, struggling to make end’s meet, seek help in trade, Agatha turns them away. Such actions stoke the flames of the village’s inescapable misery, and horrific tragedies soon become so commonplace, townspeople begin to suspect Agatha of dark witchcraft.

The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw unthreads the binding ties of faith in small-town living, mass hysteria rooted in pain, and how evil sprouts from the most innocent of intentions and desires. “What’s your legacy?” Audrey also asks her mother. It’s a startling existential plight, one that lurches away from the borders of the film to present a universal thesis of what living and barely surviving actually mean. Such themes and pointed conversation firmly worms into Lee’s flourishing artistic vision, crackling in the same vein as Robert Eggers’ The Witch but with a severely contrasting underlying message. Its ensemble of players, including Jared Abrahamson (as Colm Dwyer), Hannah Emily Anderson (Bridget Dwyer), Don McKellar (Bernard Buckley), and Geraldine O’Rawe (Deidre Buckley), deliver full-bodied, emotional performances that make the anguish feel visceral and electric.

When it becomes clear to Audrey her mother is more than willing to let the townspeople walk all over her, from her very warped perspective, Audrey seeks revenge and begins to spread vile sickness, decay, and delusions like a black, moldy plague. Lee inflicts moments of sheer unholy terror upon the viewer, and it’s almost as if you are undergoing your very own reckoning, too. Flicking through various title cards like “Incantation” and “Descent,” he conveys the story as if it is a lost, harrowing fable from the book of Grimm Fairy Tales.

The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw is absolutely bone-chilling. Much like The Witch, it most certainly won’t be every viewer’s cup of tea, yet Thomas Robert Lee’s brilliance will sure enough brand deep into your brain.

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