A 19th-century widow is tasked with making an impossible choice when, during an especially cruel winter, a ship sinks off the coast of her impoverished Icelandic fishing village. Any attempt to res...
Debatability often thickens and swells regarding what one would consider a damned soul; those who are considered such could be condemned for something they didn’t do or for something out of their control and the picky complicated fickleness of human nature never fails to blur those lines between right and wrong. Whether you think “The Damned” does good in addressing those complications is up to chance.
But it does make for an interesting theatrical experience.
As a fellow native of Iceland, Thordur Palsson is very much at home, directing this in the same veins as a guide leading you through foreboding yet familiar territory with enough stable respite as he can get away with. Like a sparking conversationalist construing an ominous fireside tale, he anchors the allure of mystery with stolid somberness and discomfort.
With grim landscapes so prehistoric in a cold and impersonal setting, signs were evident of a claustrophobic production design miraculously crafted to be as confined and inhospitable as possible, a task in which Frosti Fridriksson succeeds a little too well in achieving. Nothing but this pitilessness and rugged aura immediately siphons the hope out of this remote wasteland and replaces it with a stoicism unbalanced by the shades of any supernatural intruder; it’s nothing short of unforgiving how the accurate period setting emanates a cold Gothic sense of dread to the scope and scale just by leading us through this.
Much of the camerawork can be considered standard and of-the-norm but Eli Areson wrestles so many layered, high contrast visuals out of the limited environment with such clear visceral dichotomy with the lighting and framing despite the dreary grey, oranges and blues of the color grading. Editing compliments that unmooring weariness, tone is steadily consistent throughout, the costumes fit the natural aesthetic of the time period and Stephen McKeon‘s score is an ethereal eargasm of uneasy timbres and riveting intensity. Also, props to Thordur for not relying just on dreaded jumpscares and finding a middle ground in variety in causing stress…..even if it doesn’t always work.
This is a case of the acting being leagues ahead of the characters they’re stuck with; not many of them have anything unique that stands out beyond the occasional quirk but their performances play into the vulnerability and hastiness of their predicament so well with decent dialogue delivery, it almost gets a pass.
Odessa Young, Siobhan Finneran and Joe Cole are the only ones immediately identifiable concerning solid performance banter and character work.
In some ways, the intentions and allegorical folklore of this story remind me why history was my favorite subject in school: the way it piques one’s curiosity of the very distant past and informs you of the real and the arcane. This premise combines both with the common but nevertheless enticing moral conundrum of survival of the fittest, while focusing extra hard on the guilt and selfishness that comes with it and the line it draws between psychological and conventional horror….is neither flimsy or sturdy. The structure leans more towards what we’re used to but the execution isn’t sure of which route to take; maybe this is just me being caught up in the silly hypotheticals of the folklore to justify how narratively thin the story actually is but I believe we still get enough mileage out of the ambiguity of whether or not anything supernatural is happening around Eva and her crew, tying into the certain coping mechanisms and narratives we create to justify the atrocities surrounding us. After all, when you’re low on resources in a harsh environment, what more can you do?
My only knowledge of the Draugr is from the GOW games, angry souls too stubborn to be put to rest; here they carry over that rage as an ethereal spirit who haunts dreams and this is what I alluded to at the beginning of this review. Death doesn’t discriminate between the sinners and the saints; it only takes whether by force of necessity and reckoning with the consequences of your choices doesn’t make things any better or worse for those deemed cursed. Neither sympathy or ill will is issued towards the condemned here because of the point of view is less on the characters and more of the circumstances surrounding them and the movie’s representational, ghostly metaphors don’t really end up complicating its emotional clarity despite coming dangerously close many times.
As a study of remorse, it switches almost as sporadically as our emotions do. Unfortunately, the emotional, physical and psychological stakes set in stone with this premise are not accurately met. At best, how everyone handles the madness is strictly by the numbers and at worst, the repetition threatens to negate the tension built up beforehand. An excellent job was done slowly setting the inevitable groundwork for dissenting chaos but the payoff falls short of delivering on that tension despite the early signs of promise.
And that leads into the second issue: 90 minutes were way too short for this movie and especially of a project with this much ambition. I can appreciate the tight runtime and the confidence of crunching all of this down within that timeframe but unfortunately, it’s only just enough for the narrative to progress at a pace that only feels semi-progressive; for the few scenes that feel designed to waste time, the runtime doesn’t bother giving it enough time to waste. Not to mention the third act hampers all that momentum built up from the previous two with a REALLY abrupt ending that doesn’t feel like a conclusion.
But count my blessings, the first film of the new year wasn’t awful.
