Great base story but ends up being like most FF flicks...boring with a dumb ending.

CURSE OF AURORE is based on the real-life of tragedy Aurore Gagnon, a Canadian child who died in 1920 at the age of 10 due to severe child abuse by her stepmother and father.

Incidentally, according to Wikipedia, a younger sibling died before her but after the stepmother, a widow, moved in with the family. This all seems suspicious to me at least, but those deaths were evidently declared to be "natural". The whole affair would seem to make a good story, but the movie only focuses on Aurore. After her death, she became a cultural icon of Quebec, being the inspiration for several books and media works. The movie exploits a legend of her haunting the locale.

As a device to further enhance the realism, the movie is bookended by an episode of MindseedTV, a real-life Youtube show which deals with the paranormal. The host describes the contents of a mystery box he obtained from the dark web and which contains a USB stick with the following found footage:

three film-makers come to the tiny town where Aurore died and decide to make a horror film based on her. One of them is apparently a kleptomaniac and ends up unwittingly inviting danger of the supernatural kind for all three of them.

This is a very slightly above average found-footage horror movie presenting yet another variation on a common theme of film-makers bringing supernatural trouble upon themselves. The kleptomaniac idea is novel, and I had prior to this movie not heard of Aurore Gagnon, so there are new elements.

However, the basic structure of presenting fragments of the solution to a slow-burn mystery while providing character exposition which takes up most of the movie until in the last few minutes suddenly the danger and horror are ramped up to 11 is familiar from countless prior movies in the subgenre.

I think most found footage horror movie fans will like this, while those who don't like the subgenre won't like this movie, either.

A couple things that may turn off some people who might otherwise like this is that the residents of an actual town are all painted with the same religious nut brush, and that the movie goes to the real-life locale and uses Aurore's and her family's actual graves (I am not sure about the house which is purported to be where she died). I can see that some might find this xenophobic and exploitative, respectively. You have to decide for yourself whether that bothers you enough not to want to watch this movie.

Probably the biggest and most interesting thing about this film is that apparently Aurore Gagnon and her murder as described in the film are real and it actually happened in 1920. Also, the youtuber at the start is apparently a real youtuber with a real channel cameoing in this.

The film itself has a likeable cast and they're astonishingly not overly annoying. Even the guy who keeps stealing from people is somehow amusing in his kleptomania rather than being overly annoying.

Unfortunately, whether due to budget or not, this film is very weak and does almost nothing with its subject matter. If budget was a concern, they should have gone with a lot more subtlety or else invested a lot more in an aura of creepiness or unsettling atmosphere.

Instead we got a lot of stock "found footage" horror tropes such as really laughable photoshop work, really dumb and obvious "this is weird for no reason" things like people shuffling into a house in a straight line at 1am, and lots of gags and spooks that, if found on a film genuinely from "a thumb drive from the dark web", would prompt lots of negative comments and accusations of being fake.

The youtuber's overreaction at the very end only seems to further drive home how forced it all seems.