Summary
It’s littered with cliche, but Curon is just well-made and intelligent enough to be your new supernatural, psychological binge-watch.
This review of Curon (Netflix) is spoiler-free.
After one episode of Netflix’s Curon, an Italian original series that mashes together small-town mystery, classical horror, and coming-of-age drama, you’ll have already lost count of its various, obvious influences. But the big one is The Shining, a comparison that seems unavoidable since a significant amount of the story unfolds in an old hotel and concerns the misadventures of twins. Of course, drawing a direct comparison to one of the best horror movies ever seems naive, but Curon, which feels neat and tidy at just seven episodes, has enough of its own identity to stand out among the overcrowded supernatural-thriller thumbnails.
All the traditional elements are there. Anna, a resident of the mysterious Italian village of Curon, leaves the town after trauma and returns 17 years later with her precocious twins, Daria and Mauro, to stay in the creepy old hotel still inhabited by her beardy father Thomas and his pet wolf. So, you get that rich sense of place in a small, odd little town with its local curses, cultures, and history, but you also get the big, showy horror moments of the kids — and indeed Anna — knocking around the ramshackle old hotel in an attempt to unearth its secrets.
The strongest relationship here, though, is undoubtedly the one between Daria and Mauro, as the headstrong sister protects her shy, awkward little brother from nasty locals and his own oddities. Mauro falls neatly into the tinkerer archetype — he built a drone, for instance, which is one of the few feints at modernity made by a show that is often candlelit — and is appropriately awkward and anxious, where Daria is coming into womanhood and feels a bit hamstrung by him. This is a compelling central dynamic and the performances help to keep it as the emotional anchor in a story that quickly gets pretty weird.
There’s little in Curon that you won’t have seen before, but in this case, I’m not sure that matters. Netflix’s latest genre hodgepodge sounds a lot messier than it is, and with a lingering mystery that unfolds carefully, compelling young characters to get behind, and only seven binge-able episodes within which to tell its story, it proves to be a very watchable midweek release that just might tide over the genre fans until this weekend.
