Title: The Damned
Describe This Movie In One The Empire Strikes Back Quote:
ECHO BASE OFFICER: Your tauntaun will freeze before you reach the first marker!
HAN SOLO: Then I’ll see you in hell!
Brief Plot Synopsis: It’s called “The Parable of the Good Samaritan” for a reason.
Rating Using Random Objects Relevant To The Film: 3 Elder Scrolls out of 5.
Tagline: N/A
Better Tagline: “My [abdominal cavity] is full of eels.“
Not So Brief Plot Synopsis: Eva (Odessa Young) is spending her first winter alone in the Arctic fishing outpost she inherited from her late husband. It’s a lean winter, with the crew resorting to eating their bait by the solstice. When a strange ship wrecks in the harbor, Eva goes along with helmsman Ragnar’s (Rory McCann) decision not to rescue them, reasoning that they barely have enough provisions for themselves. Things worsen when the fishermen look for supplies on the wreck and violently repel the desperate survivors, leading to supernatural (?) consequences.
“Critical” Analysis: Despite what recent experience might have taught us, not every horror movie needs to reinvent the wheel. Alternate realities, temporal shenanigans, body swapping … it’s not always necessary. Sometimes you just want a straight ahead ghost story.
Enter The Damned, an lean, internationally produced chiller thriller set somewhere on the Arctic coast in the 1800s. Complicated character backstories are eschewed for conversational bios (e.g. “Oh, bummer your husband got killed on those rocks last year, Eva”) as we’re plopped right in to the fishing camp’s desperate situation.
It’s a rough village with rough men with names like Ragnar! And Magnus!. Eva quickly finds herself asserting herself, especially after young Daniel (Joe Cole) lets slip that Ragnar bet the other fishermen that Eva wouldn’t return after her husband’s death. She proves to be a capable leader, making the best of a damned (get it) if you do situation with the shipwreck survivors.
The Damned is a chilling affair, in more ways than one: it ranks among the coldest movies of all time. The Thing at least had some scenes in sunlight, and in The Day After Tomorrow you could try to escape to Mexico. The Damned takes places almost entirely at night, and most daytime scenes to be had are overcast or shot in the dim longhouse (it’s almost dark enough to be a Netflix release).
Director Thordur Palsson (who also came up with the story, scripted by Jamie Hannigan) keeps the action moving briskly. The Damned is less than 90 minutes long, and there’s nary a wasted moment as the fishermen’s actions ultimately lead to the arrival of a draugr, a hate-filled revenant out for revenge. Accompanying it comes growing suspicion and madness among the remaining fishermen.
One thing you don’t have to deal with in horror movies taking place before the so-called Age of Enlightenment is protagonist skepticism. After some token resistance to charwoman* Helga’s (Siobhan Finneran) warnings, pretty much everyone quickly gets on board with the supernatural revenge theory. Everyone except Jonas (Lewis Gribben), the lone Christian, who believes Helga’s pagan trinkets are responsible.
Angles like that are left unexplored, unfortunately, in service to a straightforward monster movie narrative. Palsson and The Damned ends on a rather unsatisfying note, but not until stumbling over a number of familiar tropes:
- Falling while running from a monster? Check.
- Dire portents from the aged** matron? Check.
- Daniel teaching Eva to use a rifle that practically screams “Foreshadowing!”? Check.
- Epilogue that calls just about everything that came before into question? Check.
Fortunately, The Damned is claustrophobic and eerie (and succinct) enough to keep you from dwelling on these. When gimmicks and jump scares have become the mainstream horror norm, a little 19th century spookery is just what the bloodletter ordered.
*Think “Camp Mom.”
**For the time, anyway: Siobhan Finneran is 58 years old.
The Damned is in theaters today.
