Directed By Thordur Palsson

Starring – Odessa Young, Joe Cole, Lewis Gribben

The Plot – Eva (Young), a 19th-century widow is tasked with making an impossible choice when, in the middle of an especially cruel winter, a ship sinks off the coast of her isolated fishing post. Eva and her crew must choose to either rescue the shipwrecked or survive the winter with their last remaining food. Facing the consequences of their choice and tormented by their guilt, the inhabitants wrestle with a mounting sense of dread and begin to believe they are all being punished for their choices.

Rated R for bloody violent content, suicide and some adult language.

The Damned | Official Trailer (HD) | Vertical

POSITIVES

Robert Eggers reaffirmed with ‘The Lighthouse’ that psychological thrillers inside of isolated settings still hold an effectiveness in getting under the skin of its audience, and with ‘The Damned’ Palsson elicits from the consciousness of a grieving widow, whose unresolved psychological duress paints a lot of mystique and ambiguity to the way he steers this scintillating ship of a feature-length directorial debut. As a writer, this involves Palsson constructing uncertainty from the depths of his protagonist, where the extreme imagery and unpredictable incidents casually happening to this unfortunate crew constantly push the evocative envelope for just what is loosely defined as fantasy or reality, with a compelling lore to the established backstory of this haunting spirit called The Draugur, which not only makes the dread of this crew feel inescapable, but also wisely leaves the door open for the possibilities in the development of the story, which effortlessly deviate to supernatural horror at just the right moments to constantly keep audiences guessing. There’s also a lot of depth and development given to every one of these supporting crew members to make their personalities stand out from one another, with alcohol-fueled interactions that simultaneously register their harmless crudeness and pocketed dynamics, which evolve the power struggle within the group once the shit hits the fan, quite naturally. But Palsson’s vitality as a writer can only be surpassed by his articulation as a gripping director, primarily in the distinct channeling within foreboding environment that does lead to some unsettlingly thick moments of bottled tension that pay off seamlessly, but never during the moments you think they will. Much credit goes to the gloomy color grading within Eli Arenson’s cinematography, as it tangibly paints the unforgiving cold and isolation factors of the established setting, all with breathtaking scenery of snow-covered mountains and surrounding waters that elicit so much intoxicating beauty to a film constantly plagued by death, but Palsson’s bizarre usage of the editing stitching so many of these scenes together, with abrupt jolts forward, makes this feel like a frenetic fever dream that the audience nor Eva are never able to wake from, leaving our already contested grip with reality feeling even more conflicted by various shadow outlines and ferocious sound deposits that effortlessly paint the kind of false sense of security that comes with digging so deep in the enveloping darkness that comes to consume these characters. Because of such, jump scares are definitely a factor to the movie’s prominence, but never the kind that are predictably telegraphed as early as twenty seconds prior, instead constructing several instances of red herrings in outline that leave them unguarded at just the exact moments they choose to exhale. On top of this, the aforementioned thick atmospheric uneasiness, with a persistently invigorating score from Stephen McKeon, conjures the kind of enveloping ominousness and dread factors that make our characters feel so helpless and hopeless with the shape-shifting conflict that unceremoniously haunts them, reflecting accordingly to the thematic tangibility with grief that weighs on the film like a wet blanket that Eva nor us will ever find resolve from. Touching on Ava, the performance from Odessa Young is her single biggest step forward as a commanding presence, with such a rich variety of emotional resonance to her portrayal that uniquely stems from the various levels of importance from each of the pocketed dynamics that she shares with other characters, as they meet their untimely demise. Fear, anger, desperation and gut-wrenching sadness each find their way to the deliveries that she taps committedly into, as one woman unable to escape death have come to define both her personal and professional lives, and with Young’s demeanor during down moments already reserved for evidential tenderness that can’t obscure the proverbial strings that are keeping her frailty from inching out, it puts much of the turbulent moments to the group in her capable hands, where Young capably and confidently taps into such an overwhelming vulnerability factor for the character with the kind of boldly bulging eyes that constantly have watery remorse on tap.

NEGATIVES

Not everything lands accordingly within the dimensions of this script, primarily in some decisions paid to the characters that at least initially make it difficult to invest in their particular plights. While I understand completely that the conflict of this movie depends entirely on one particular decision being made by this rambunctious crew, it and a couple others are the kinds in these horror movies that completely drive me nuts, where logic and even respect are obscured in order to casually push the storytelling forward, before asking for your sympathies, and while one of these decisions were necessary to set the motions in development, a second one following it feels like the characters tested their luck and safety in ways that weren’t even remotely necessary, leaving me with the attitude of them getting what they deserve, instead of feeling like unlucky characters who were a product of wrong place at the wrong time. There’s also another female character in the movie, who I summarize as being the exposition machine for the aforementioned Draugur spirit, in that her whole intended purpose is to reveal lessons about the lore of the character that the others wouldn’t attain without her. In my opinion, the confrontations within the group are easy enough to decipher in meaning without the need to audibly foreshadow what eventually materializes, and though she disappears from the film around the midway point, with no mention of what might’ve happened to her (At least to my recollection), I feel like the character could’ve better been served in being that one legitimately safe link to Eva’s internalized grief, especially since the entirety of the rest of the crew are males who she feels evidentially timid towards opening up to. Finally, the film feels a bit condensed and conflicted by an 84-minute run time that rushes quite a bit of these developments, particularly those of the third act, with so many body deposits that it feels like the film is running out of time to resolve certain matters. There’s obviously exceptions to the rule, where urgency can be used as a tool to flesh out a chaotic energy to what’s transpiring, however so many of these deaths happen so close to one another that it dramatically undercuts the significance of one particular one that holds such a significance to Eva’s own healing process, and between it and the movie’s rushed and flatly resurrected climax, it ends the film on the lowest moment of its meaningful momentum, with the kind of quietly constructed fade to black that leaves audible room for the creaking of auditorium seats, as the audience vacate a movie with endless possibilities that settled for the most uninteresting of them to resolve its big twist.

OVERALL
‘The Damned’ is a moodily atmospheric psychological horror film that lives and breathes in the cloud of unresolved and inescapable grief too thick to decipher fantasy from reality, but one that Thordur Palsson uses to vividly tap into Icelandic folklore to reinvent the wheel of paranormal hauntings. Despite inferior sections of rushed and abrupt execution of vital developments, the film’s sum of its whole manufactures legitimate atmospheric thrills that help to pay off its slow-burn execution, with a grippingly haunting performance from Odessa Young that tenderly entrances us to the paralyzing grip of remorseful loss.

My Grade: 7.3 or B-