Odessa Young shines in this stark, blood-soaked saga of survival and supernatural retribution.
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
Apologies to Luchino Visconti and his 1969 classic of the same name, “The Damned” arrives from Icelander Thordur Palsson (TV’s “Valhalla Murders”). The film is a densely atmospheric, Robert Eggers-style tale of the supernatural, involving a fishing station on a remote, fog-bound, rocky coastline and what happens after the station’s starving inhabitants fail to rescue sailors aboard a sinking ship. According to Helga (Siobhan Finneran), the station’s resident Nordic mystic, they have stirred up a ghost-like spirit of revenge, which will invade the hearts and minds of the living and destroy them.
The film is, in some ways, a mid-19th-century version of Christian Nyby’s “The Thing” (1951), but with an English-speaking cast of Nordic types instead of a bunch of post-WWII American soldiers and scientists. The leader of the fishing station is a young widow named Eva (Odessa Young, “Assassination Nation”), whose late husband Magnus was the previous owner. The sailors’ helmsman is a giant named Ragnar (Roy McCann, “Game of Thrones”), who rides roughshod over the others.
Clearly, cinematographer Eli Arenson (“Lamb”) decided that Young’s glowing face would be the beacon of hope and love in a freezing, monochromatic, snow-and-windswept world. He and the actor transform that face into the film’s most significant and significantly lighted icon of humanity.
Eva is romantically interested in a handsome sailor named Daniel (Joe Cole, “A Prayer Before Dawn”). The sailors are a rough bunch who drink at night and sing songs, beating their hands on a wooden table. They are a superstitious gang, and once they have committed the sin of allowing the others to die, they become convinced that they are doomed to share the same fate despite Helga’s charms and guidance.
One by one, the sailors are picked off by the illness and madness that “the ghost” brings. Readers of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket” and the early 20th-century tales of Algernon Blackwood will feel they are in familiar territory. The film opens with Eva gloomily inspecting empty fish-drying racks and thinking, “We should not be here.”
The screenplay by Jamie Hannigan and Polsson is a bit too vague about the ghost. Most of what happens does not require an angry revenant. The events could be the result of starving and freezing men going mad. I’m not certain what good that sort of ambiguity does to the film. In the beginning, Helga tells her fellow station inhabitants a folk tale of a watery ghost seeking vengeance on the brother who drowned and murdered him. The set-up is typically too obvious. The monster in “The Damned” is referred to as “It.” The only way to destroy “it” is to set it ablaze. A religious sailor named Jonas (Lewis Gribben, TV’s “Black Mirror”) warns the others that “Its rage will not be fed.” We get glimpses of the creature from Eva’s point of view while she tries to hide from it. The film has more blood than a production of “Macbeth,” which also has a ghost. If Eggers’ “Nosferatu” gives you a yearning for period Gothic horror, you might want to give “The Damned” a shot, even if the ending is botched.
‘The Damned’
Rating: R for bloody violent content, suicide, and some language.
Cast: Odessa Young, Joe Cole, Siobhan Finneran
Director: Thordur Palsson
Writers: Jamie Hannigan, Palsson
Running Time: 99 minutes
Where to Watch: AMC Boston Common, AMC Causeway, AMC South Bay and other suburban locations
Grade: B
Boston Movie News 