WHILE vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein and even Mummies get to have prominent roles, even speaking parts in their films, zombies – and the actors playing them – have always had a bum deal. After all, there’s not much you can do with a braindead, purely instinctive cannibalistic eating machine, other than to have them stomp about with their flesh dropping off.

The Cured not only gives zombies (to be exact, former zombies) a voice, but it breathes life and resonance into a genre that was beginning to feel that it was, itself, walking dead. This modestly scaled but emotionally heavy-hitting film has a killer conceit that delivers on a number of levels. It’s an outstanding feature debut from its writer and director David Freyne.

It's set in Ireland in the here and now. Like the rest of Europe the country has been ravaged by a virus that transformed people into cannibalistic monsters. But a cure has been found, and most of those affected have been returned to normal and reintegrated into society, in a manner of speaking.

Freyne’s premise has two catches. The first, is that those who are brought back to humanity retain the memories of what they did as monsters – in gory detail, including the fact that they may well have eaten their loved ones. They return haunted, troubled by nightmares, fearful of returning to what they were.

The second catch is that those who were unaffected don’t want them back. It can’t be easy to have a normal conversation with someone who once would have turned you into a kebab.

The result is a prejudiced, segregated society, in the grip of civil unrest. Families reject their own, because they are scared and appalled. The government is about to euthanise the 25% that have remained resistant to the cure. Some of the recovered have created the Cured Alliance, using terrorism as a way of reasserting their self-respect.

Within this powder keg, Freyne’s focus is on three people. Senan (Sam Keeley) is newly cured. To his surprise he’s taken in by his sister-in-law Abbie (Ellen Page), a journalist with a young son, whose husband died during the infection, about which Senan may know more than he’s letting on. Senan’s cured friend from the treatment centre, Conor (Tom Vaughn-Lawlor), a former barrister and would-be politician, now street cleaner, is stoking up unrest and wants Senan alongside him .

Freyne and his small cast admirably crank up the tension and the thought-provoking questions that could be as applicable to aspects of real life as to this post-zombie world – how to live with the memories of one’s own despicable crime, how easy to trust someone who is supposedly reformed, how successful and how humane is rehabilitation in our own society?

Around these themes, the horror mechanics thunder along nicely, particularly the friction created by the Machiavellian Conor, who has some sharp hooks in Senan (Freyne also introduces an almost cognisant pack quality in his zombies, which also bonds the cured in disturbing ways) and looks as though he’d still like to eat Abbie with a nice Chianti.

The Canadian Ellen Page (best known for Juno and Inception) offers a solid portrait of a strong, decent woman coping virtually alone in a sea of distrust and fear. The Irishmen Keeley and Vaughn-Lawlor give two sides of the same coin, as people returning from a waking nightmare with very different views of how to move forward.

A subplot involving the doctor who invented the cure works less well, and the denouement feels more rushed than open-ended. These quibbles aside, it’s a tense, creepy, thought-provoking, very well-conceived horror film.