The mist that settles over Thomas Robert Lee’s debut feature doesn’t lift. It pools between the farmsteads of his unnamed plague-stricken community, sits on the fence posts, turns the fields of rural Ontario to something closer to grey — and the Earnshaw property, sitting on a rise above the rest of them, stays impossibly green. That distinction is The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw’s first and most eloquent argument, made before any actor has spoken a word.

Catherine Walker plays Agatha Earnshaw, a widow whose daughter Audrey (Sofia Banzhaf) has been kept from the community below for seventeen years — hidden, sheltered, trained in something the neighbours can only call malevolence. Those neighbours have suffered steadily: crops failing, animals dying, children wasting. When Bridget Dwyer (Hannah Emily Anderson), alone among the younger generation, crosses the invisible boundary to the Earnshaw farm, the film’s two central women begin to circle each other in a negotiation the screenplay keeps productively opaque.

Walker, who carried A Dark Song through grief and ritual three years before this, brings a different kind of stillness to Agatha — not desperation but patience, the composed menace of someone who has been waiting a very long time for the community’s fear to catch up with reality. Lee’s camera trusts her face more than his screenplay does, framing it against the green hills and the grey sky with an artist’s attention to what light does to a person’s age.

What gives the film its most consistent achievement is its visual grammar: the muted, achromatic palette of the suffering community against the saturated world of the Earnshaw farm. This is production design and cinematography working together on an argument about who deserves abundance and who gets plague. It is sustained with real discipline across 93 minutes, which is the film’s strongest structural choice and its most effective horror device — the beautiful place is the threatening one.

Where The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw cannot quite sustain the argument is in narrative momentum. The story — plague, accusation, possession, revenge — knows what it wants to say about inherited female power and the violence that piety inflicts on women, but it settles for atmosphere where momentum would serve those ideas better. The third act arrives with a severity that the build has partially earned and partially not.

Hannah Emily Anderson plays Bridget as the audience’s way in — a young woman drawn toward a world that operates by different rules. Anderson plays the disorientation with quiet precision. The ensemble around her — Don McKellar, Geraldine O’Rawe, Sean McGinley as the suspicious community — does the period-piece work of maintaining a group that has decided what it believes without quite admitting it.

Folk horror earns its power from the weight of belief made physically present in the landscape. Lee understands this: the Irish immigrant heritage of his community, displaced into Canadian soil, gives the film a specific cultural displacement that makes the supernatural feel like grief rather than genre architecture. What separates Audrey Earnshaw from The Witch or Midsommar is its loyalty to female perspective at both ends: Agatha and Audrey are not victims, not villains. Their illegibility is the point.

Thomas Robert Lee’s debut establishes a filmmaker with a clear visual argument and the patience to maintain it. That the screenplay hasn’t yet fully caught up with what the images know is a condition of first features, not a ceiling.