In a life-or-death situation, would you risk your own life to save others? What if that life-or-death situation were to last several weeks or months? And what if saving lives actively puts your life and your people in a more precarious situation?
It starts to get a bit more morally ambiguous.
The Damned, directed by Thordur Palsson, is a story about this very predicament. Taking place in the 1800s in a remote fishing station during a dangerous and long winter; widow Eva (Odessa Young) struggles with her decision not to aid a sinking vessel. Did she make the right decision, or will her fishing station face monstrous repercussions?
The very north of Scandinavia in the mid-nineteenth century was the hardest of times, with the frozen wastes not helping the fishing station’s efficiency. The food stores were running low, and the men were not in great spirits, especially when their patron, Eva, decided to ignore their pleas to help a ship sinking offshore. Yeah, sure, Ragnar (Rory McCann) points out the pragmatism in that decision, but it’s a bit heartless.
The men’s guilt only grows when Eva chooses to send them on a scavenging mission, picking the bones of the sunken ship. What they didn’t count on, however, were survivors clinging to life near the wreckage. Oh no! There was no room at the inn, so to speak. A gruesome encounter later and our fisherman troupe have become murderers.
Worse still, the bodies of the fallen wash up on the beach and perhaps, just perhaps, one has become a Draugr, a monster from Norse folklore who has come back to life to enact his revenge. Oooofff. They cannot catch a break!
What The Damned does brilliantly is its atmosphere. Just like in The Thing, the frozen wastes give a sense of isolation and danger. There is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and nobody can save them. It’s a perfect setting for a stalking creature to be terrorising folk. The weather only adds to this overall feeling of dread when the blizzards make the average visibility distance around three feet in front of them.
The use of an occasional jumpscare doesn’t hurt either. But it’s not what you think. Palsson doesn’t lure you into a false sense of security and then has a ghost or a monster screaming its face off, trying to frighten you off your seat. No, no, no. Surprisingly, it’s in the quieter moments of dread with sudden cuts to different scenes that really got me the most, once which actually provoked an audible “f*cking hell!” from me.
The idea of the monster is what’s scary here. I only know the Draugr from being the b*tch-like enemies from God of War (2018), the fodder for the Leviathan Axe. Here, though, it’s made to sound like an ultimate big bad out for revenge. According to the movie’s lore, it will attack a camp psychologically and physically, and one by one they will fall. Eva’s hallucinations (or were they?) only add to the scariness of this monster.
The only thing I couldn’t figure out is how the heck did it go down that way? I’m not going to spoil anything, but a couple of the deaths didn’t make any logical sense. Maybe I can put it down to the group’s psychological state and their collective guilt, but I’m still scratching my head.
The cast was great. Singling out Odessa Young in particular, she puts in an applaudable performance as the tough yet haunted widow in charge of the fishing station. As the movie progresses, her guilt grows and she becomes more and more desperate. Every decision brings her closer to the brink, and Young makes me believe all of it. She’s fantastic.
I also want to highlight two other actors who were really memorable. Francis Magee as Skuli, a fisherman who is almost always confined to the background, but when called upon he’s excellent and doesn’t chew scenery. He knew his role and played it perfectly. Lastly, Siobhan Finneran who played servant Helga, was excellent. Helga provided the lore dump without it being shoehorned in via disembodied narration or text on the screen, and Finneran plays the scared, superstitious woman incredibly.
The Damned is an atmospheric monster story that relies much more on the anticipation of the scare rather than that of a cheap monster roar. Isolated and vulnerable, the fishing station is the perfect setting for this kind of story, and although it reminds me a ton of The Thing with its environments, the tone is so different that they aren’t comparable. The story itself kept me engaged from the beginning until the end, and that was only aided by the terrific acting performances from the cast.
There were some aspects that still left me confused with how the narrative progressed, and that took me out of the story slightly. However, I don’t think there’s any doubt that I would recommend this film to others. If you’re after a tense psychological horror story with Norse overtones, then look no further. The Damned has you.
The Damned releases 3rd January in the US and the 10th January in the UK and Ireland.
