The menacing blue of distant, jagged mountains opens The Damned (2024), revealing an inhospitable, if still beautiful Icelandic landscape. It immediately looks like an environment ill-fitted for human habitation, and so it turns out to be. The female narrator who speaks briefly to us espouses a similar sentiment, walking through what is left of the winter food store and wondering how she and her small group are going to survive. The narration ceases, but we keep our focus on the woman – Eva, a widow whose husband died doing the work she now oversees. As owner of this fishing station, she is determined to make a go of it for his sake, as well as her own. She has nothing else left.
Indoors, the small gathering is a bit more cheerful – as tough as things are, they still have hopes of a good profit come Spring. They pass the time as best as they can: storytelling, toasting and singing. They are also optimistic enough to start thinking of ways to spend those coming wages. It’s the sort of optimism which you know is going to get pummelled out of them. As such, the next day, their precarious existence is further complicated when Eva spots a foundering ship out on the rocks. The small community is horrified, but it’s regarded as a tragedy best contemplated from afar: any talk of a rescue is silenced. How can they safely rescue these strangers? With barely enough food for themselves?
With regret, Eva agrees to ignore the ship, and by the next day, the ship has disappeared beneath the waterline. But there is useful salvage; a barrel washes ashore which contains food, to the delight and relief of the group. Hungrier than they are humane, this prompts the group to investigate further, now willing to risk a small boat to see if anything else of use has floated up from the wreck.
They find far more than that. They find men – cold, desperate men, clinging to the rocks. When these men see the boat approaching, they risk leaping into the icy water to try to reach it. Panic ensues: if they get into the vessel, then they could overload or even sink it. The fishermen fight desperately with the strangers, and the situation grows violent. This is a moment of reckoning: it’s now gone far beyond simple non-intervention.
Wracked with remorse, the small community begins to debate their role in the fates of the outsiders. One of their number, Helga (Siobhan Finneran) – who often entertains the group with ghost stories – now turns to stories of a darker note, warning them of supernatural repercussions for their actions. Stranded in an Icelandic winter, where every creak or sound now resonates with potential meaning, the group begins to turn on itself. Or is there someone – something – out there?
The film offers an intriguing look at folklore as a defence against straitened times, and as a means of asserting order over the disorderly. Likewise, the supernatural can represent fears and feelings too large and complex to contemplate – an externalisation, albeit one which whips around and terrifies the believers. Are the dead vengeful? The Damned sustains a brooding ambiguity throughout, doing enough to keep us wondering. That said, it’s audiences with a love for the kind of stark, semi-historical content who will find most to love here: this film is the very definition of slow burn, carrying a formidable psychological weight which has little truck with jump scares, or more anticipated horror genre features.
The film’s production values speak in its favour, too. Granted, it’d be hard to point a camera at any part of the Icelandic shore and somehow mess it up, but the film still looks exemplary – cold, stark, sharp outlines, contrasted with warm, candlelit interiors. The house is too sparse to be genuinely cosy, but it still symbolises some kind of hope of survival. Darkness and shadow are used very cleverly, too. All in all, the setting is a vital and well-realised part of the whole. A stellar cast also helps: old hands like Rory McCann and Francis Magee do a solid job of looking and acting as if they have a lifetime of hard living behind them, whilst the younger cast look like they’re getting there fast. Eva probably spends too much time gazing at a distance, but she is in an unfolding series of strange situations – a young widow, ostensibly in charge, but not fitted for the physical or emotional rigours of the job. If all the passivity looks a little samey, then it’s understandable at least.
Another criticism: The Damned’s slow-burn approach electively sacrifices much in the way of surprise, sticking to its brooding, barely-there forward motion throughout. It’s clear by the one-hour mark that the film is more about mood and spectacle than vast narrative developments: most of what it offers is potentially imagined or fantasised, and feels imagined, even when it is resolving some of its plot points. But its key strength is in how it presents the terrible impact of human emotion. It’s a gruelling study of guilt, one which can feel challenging in places, but at all times it’s an artistic and sensory experience – a well-sustained and well-presented ordeal, if you like.
The Damned (2024) is available on digital and VOD from 3rd January, 2025 and will be in UK and Irish cinemas from January 10th.