The Curse of Styria – review

Directors: Mauricio Chernovetzky & Mark Devendorf

Release date: 2014

Contains spoilers

My first draft of this review included a long rant about the production company and how they treated their kickstarter backers. The rant did not affect the score of the film but I believe that the producers treated their backers in a shoddy way and openly broke the ethos of crowdsourcing. However I have decided to remove the full rant (just having this mini rant) so as not to detract too much from the review of a film that (despite the events of the last 18 months) deserves our full attention.

Stephen Rea as Dr Hill

It is 1989 and a car pulls up to the Hungarian checkpoint. As well as a driver the car contains Dr Hill (Stephen Rea, Interview with the Vampire, Underworld Awakening & Werewolf: the Beast Amongst Us), an art historian, and his daughter Lara (Eleanor Tomlinson). There is an issue at the crossing and the guards suggest she cannot cross as her papers are no good. A bribe gets them over and in to a waiting car.

Lara's Diary is full of dark images

They get to their destination, a castle that has been closed since 1917 and was used as a sanatorium for consumption victims due to the spa below it. It has taken Hill 10 years to get permission to remove murals painted within the castle, along with a Dr Burkson – who will be arriving at the castle with his daughter Anna. Hill has arranged a tutor for Lara, Eva Pasztor (Erika Marozsán), and Lara has had to come after being expelled from her boarding school – where it is alleged that she pushed a girl down some stairs, something she denies but also illustrated in her diary. That night she dreams of being a little girl and being attacked by a woman who says she is taking her home.

grabbing the basket

In the morning she hears a man calling out the name Carmilla. He leaves a basket of food by an opening into the castle and a hand grabs the food. Dr Hill is working when he hears a noise – it is workmen come to demolish part of the castle. He arrives at where they are working just as a sledgehammer crashes into one of the murals. An altercation occurs, which is broken up by General Spiegel (Jacek Lenartowicz), more bribes stop the work but Spiegel informs Hill that Burkson (and thus Anna) has been denied entrance to the country under suspicion of being a spy. Lara takes this news badly and we see that she keeps a razor in her diary and her arms are covered with cutting scars. The hole in the mural revealed a hidden stairwell that makes Hill suggest the spa was in use pre-Roman times.

the crash

Lara walks in the grounds, her razor in hand. Suddenly she sees a car careening along a road and crashing. A young woman, Carmilla (Julia Pietrucha), gets out of the passenger side, staggering from the crash. A bloodied hand pulls the passenger door closed and Lara screams as the car appears to try and run Carmilla down. The car speeds away. Lara tries to talk to the girl and offers to phone the police – she says no to alerting the police. However she does go to the castle with Lara, who smuggles her inside without alerting her father to the woman’s presence. Having cleaned her up, and lent her clothes, Lara is taken out into the Hungarian countryside by Carmilla, were they look at the stars. Lara falls asleep and, after a disturbed dream about cutting that seems ritualistic, wakes on the hill top alone.

Lara and Carmilla

Now, it should be stated that Carmilla is not a vampire – at this point. The General is looking for her (and, it is implied, was the driver of the car), she is referred to both as an orphan and a gypsy, and she has lived in the vaults of the castle. She suggests to Lara, at one point, that the Karnstein crypts are in the castle, that they were vampires and one was missed when the rest were destroyed. At that point she does say “my crypt is close”. However it is after she is caught by the general, and subsequently cuts her own wrist and throat, that she becomes a vampire. In this vision the idea of a vampire is that it is a suicide, unable to rest, who seeks to drive others (one book says their loved ones) to suicide. Directors Mauricio Chernovetzky and Mark Devendorf touched on this when I interviewed them.

Feral attack

Other girls in the area kill themselves (the first one to do so is the girl buried in the funeral sequence that is an integral part of Le Fanu’s story) but some become feral and violent – all sense gone, with a need to bite and rend flesh. The locals try destroying those who have died to cure the living – beheading the first girl in her grave and later burning all the suicide girls in their graves. Of course this can’t be successful as the first was Carmilla, not the buried girl. It is an interesting slant on the vampire and, whilst there is bloodletting courtesy of the feral girls, this is very much a different take on vampirism to the norm.

Lara and Carmilla

The character of Lara is absolutely central to the film, her struggles and her past (both that which she remembers and that hidden from her) are fundamental to the narrative and so the excellent performance by Eleanor Tomlinson is key. That said Stephen Rae is excellent within the film also. The post-punk soundtrack works very well - the presence of the Jesus and Mary Chain standing out to me.

Burning in their graves

There is a motif of moths through the film. Whilst the moth is part of the Slavic vampire folklore I don’t think they were being used in that folkloric sense. I did get a feel from the film not dissimilar to that produced by the Moth Diaries (nothing to do with the moths in the title), however the Curse of Styria had the advantage over that vehicle in that it had a palpable Gothic atmosphere, provided in great part by the excellent castle location. It also didn’t have the weaker storyline aspects that detracted from the other film.

8 out of 10. The imdb page is here.

Edit: 24/2/15 - it was announced that the North American release of the film will be renamed Angels of Darkness.