The beauty and simplicity of the horror tale The Damned lie in its uncomplicated conceit of the invasion of an isolated space. Many films like this have come before, and others will come after, but director Thordur Palsson – working from a lean yet powerful script by Jamie Hannigan – makes a brilliant entry into this genre with gorgeous visuals and riveting performances that keep us spellbound for its mercilessly short running time. Familiar faces and tropes may dot this landscape, but there’s a subtle spike to it all that benefits from its late 19th-century setting, devoid of modern technology, attitudes, and language.
Palsson knocks it down to the spare nuts and bolts of what he needs to tell this story effectively: a remote location, a fateful decision, and the growing tension and calamity resulting from that decision. The rest is just sitting back and waiting for things to go horribly askew, which they do at an alarmingly rapid pace. Making everything worse is the knowledge that help is completely unavailable; the only way out is blocked by snow, and even then, it requires a three-day journey to the next town. Palsson ensures we feel this isolation in our very bones, so much so that each subsequent choice made is full of dread and foreboding.
The decision? Well, it’s twofold, but one leads to another: An Icelandic fishing station’s inhabitants – a woman who owns the station and her charwoman, and an all-male fishing crew renting space and equipment for the season – are in dire straits, their food stores depleted with no fish on the lines or in storage. They witness a big ship run aground on a shoal and decline to search for survivors, lest they endanger their own lives; when the wrecked ship’s cargo washes ashore, station owner Eva (Odessa Young) and crew chief Ragnar (Rory McCann) make the call to go out and salvage what – not whom – they can. But some of the sunken ship’s crew are still alive, and some of them die when the fishermen keep them from boarding and capsizing their only boat.
There’s no malice in Eva’s decisions; she’s one year removed from losing her husband to similar circumstances, and she’s not about to lose anyone else. And with their desperation setting in, it’s not hard to weigh the risk vs. reward of attempting salvage. It’s a difficult, embittered choice that she and Ragnar make in leaving the survivors to die, but she and Ragnar are in charge of this ersatz family, and they’ll do anything to protect it. However, Eva starts seeing shadowy figures in the dark, the men start succumbing to fevers and hallucinations, and charwoman Helga (Siobhan Finneran) claims that a draugr – a malevolent zombie-type revenant sent to take revenge – is responsible for all of it.
A genre-savvy fan might pick out shades of John Carpenter’s The Thing, Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians, and a little bit of David Twohy’s underappreciated Below, but only just; Hannigan’s script is of a different anima altogether, focusing more on the fraying relationships and survival rather than give completely over to the “villain” of the film. The word is in quotes because we’re kept quite in the dark as to what constitutes this film’s villain. Is it the draugr? Is it the fragile psyches of the surviving men and women? Or is it the paranoia that makes some of them turn on each other? The Damned has a lot of notions to throw at us, and while there might be an answer for it, it’s not an easy one to take.
Odessa Young punches through with a brutally honest performance as Eva, a widow at her wits’ end concerning her business and the fishing crew. She plays Eva as a bit removed from the others, but she finds a kinship with Daniel (Joe Cole) that she dares not press further out of fear of impropriety and challenges to her authority. Eva has earned the others’ respect, and Young takes care to walk that line between being too personal and being as coldly professional as possible, all while grieving her husband and maintaining a business. Captured in what feels like natural light by cinematographer Eli Arenson, Young is framed as our lifeboat amid a turbulent sea, being our guide through these perilous occurrences but not immune to them.
Arenson’s photography is gorgeous and forbidding, inviting us to gaze at the beauty of Eva’s surroundings while simultaneously letting us know in no uncertain terms that this is a willing hell, attended to and inhabited by those who dare enter. His shots carefully establish the claustrophobia of this land with no easy escape, similar to his vistas from Valdimar Jóhannsson’s Lamb, trapping its denizens in the middle of nowhere with a strange force bearing down upon them. The Damned is a visually arresting piece of work, thrilling with its slow-rolling suspense and leaving us with terrifying realizations about the truth behind these events.
