The Damned (now streaming on Hulu) is a slow burn set in the bitter cold, an atmospheric cabin-feverish horror-thriller playing out in the depths of winter in 19th-century seaside Iceland. Why people tried to exist in such conditions in a time before the invention of forced-air heating is explained in the opening minutes: it seems that one could earn a tidy fortune if one’s fishing haul was bountiful enough. And so director Thordur Palsson and his co-writer Jamie Hannigan hang their hat on that conceit, concocting a story about a group of anglers – led by Odessa Young of The Stand and Peaky Blinders star Joe Cole – enduring various hardships that only get worse when an ancient Norse ghoul-thing known as a draugr gets involved. Way to pile on, ancient Norse ghoul-thing known as a draugr!
THE DAMNED: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: “We should not be here.” That’s Eva (Young) speaking in voiceover. It’s the most reasonable sentiment in this movie about miserable people in a miserable locale working miserable jobs. Maybe they’ll be rich someday, but then again, maybe being poor and warm is a viable alternative? They venture out upon the ocean by day to catch fish, and return to a cabin at night to drink and sing shanties and remain somewhat less frozen by the fire. Eva heads this operation, inheriting the gig from her husband who died, of what we know not, but considering the setting, one imagines it being absolutely horrid and painful and either brutally drawn-out or brutally sudden. So it goes. It’s been a low-yield fishing season, and they’ve been forced to eat the bait, so some amongst this crew might be next for the adjacent hill adorned with a handful of gravemarkers. Fun times!
Eva’s tough, though. She has to be, to lead this collection of grizzled coots, fresh-faced young dolts and one old lady. Among them is helmsman Ragnar (Rory McCann, of Game of Thrones fame), second-in-charge Daniel (Cole) and the cronelike Helga (Siobhan Finneran), a grandmotherly sort whose role here is to cook and serve food and be the caretaker of all the wacko superstitious lore that’s so grim and silly and laughable that it just can’t be true. I mean, she even tells a creepy story over booze and dim firelight, like a camp counselor trying to spook the kiddies.
One fateful day – note: horror movies rarely have non-fateful days – the group stands agape as they watch a ship wrecking on the rocks over yonder, the very same rocks that claimed Eva’s poor spouse. And so they face a difficult decision: Do they stage a rescue, or stand pat? They not only risk their own wreck, but they can barely feed themselves, so the prospect of providing for dozens of survivors would only add to the misery. It’s Eva’s boat, so she makes the tough call to remain ashore. It’s the logical choice, but how ironic is it that they’ll all soon be plagued with great and mighty illogic as a result? Very ironic.
The next morn, Eva finds a barrel washed up from the wreck. It’s full of edible food. So not only did they let those men suffer and die, she and her crew benefited from it. That’s some bad mojo, karma, juju, woo-woo or what-have-you. They decide to row out to the fateful spot and there’s a whole bunch of men clinging to a rock and they swarm the boat and Eva’s guys fight them off so they don’t get swamped and during the melee Daniel plants a hatchet in one of the men’s skulls and he sinks sinks sinks into the briny deeps. The fisherfolk head back, deeply disturbed. And soon enough, the bodies begin washing up on their shore, thus prompting ol’ Helga to rev up the ghost stories about draugrs that inflict people with it’s-not-I-who’s-crazy-it-is-I-who-am-mad loonybrains. Sure enough, Eva starts seeing figures in black-metal-guy facepaint appearing and disappearing in the shadows. And that’s when we realize something else around here is hungry – the graveyard. For corpses!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Eggersims galore here – The Damned boasts the period authenticity and gloomy thematics of The Witch (occult folklore), The Lighthouse (madness, maritime setting) and The Northman (Scandinavian occult folklore and madness). The first season of The Terror (with episodes directed by Edward Berger) comes to mind, too.
Performance Worth Watching: Young assimilates into oppressive horror-movie atmospherics with the best of ’em. To be less glib, she occupies the most screen time here, and ably bears the brunt of the drama, finding her character’s discomfort zone between fearful apprehension and confidence in her survivalist capabilities.
Memorable Dialogue: Daniel makes the unspoken theme spoken: “The only thing I know is, the living are always more dangerous than the dead.”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Give this to The Damned – few people in movies make logical decisions. (Heck, even Tom Cruise in the Mission: Impossibles often chooses to save the life of a friend even though it puts the entire population of the world at risk.) It’s far more dramatic for movie characters to lead with their emotions, whether in rom-com dilemmas, survivalist thrillers or horror scenarios that defy logic even more than the rom-coms and thrillers. The heart rules. And that’s why the irony at this movie’s core is rather tasty, and borderline ingenious.
That said, despite such food for thought (in a movie about starving people – more irony!), The Damned may test your patience with its languid pace and propensity for things-that-go-boo cliches. Palsson emphasizes atmosphere over action, but doesn’t give his characters much of interest to do within those atmospherics – Young’s maudlin brooding occupies a goodly chunk of screen time, and she has more than her fair share of waking nightmares where soggy are-they-or-are-they-not-apparitions appear and disappear, leaving trails of wet bootprints in the cabin, which she then follows into the dark recesses of a soul that allowed her to prioritize the safety of her men over the lives of others. Yawn? Also, the film being rooted in folk horror, it inevitably boasts its share of Evil Twigs (less so Evil Antlers, which are probably more scarce in this region of Iceland), although one presumes ol’ Helga crafts her totems out of driftwood, so she gets off on a technicality here.
It’s easy to appreciate how Palsson captures the desolate beauty of Iceland, in all its misty-foggy shades of blue and dirty white. Same goes for a provocative conclusion, and the dramatic emphasis on Eva’s damned-if-you-do/don’t decision, which we can consider a metaphor for the impossibility of living a life of moral purity. The binaries are so often false, aren’t they? And considering the unforgivingly cold hell of a place Eva lives in, consequences lurk in the shadows, waiting to leap out and get her, no matter her intentions.
Our Call: STREAM IT, but only if you’re up for a downer.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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