It’s been a damn cold winter in Iceland’s Westfjords. Resources have dried up in a small fishing village set along an Arctic bay. A crew of fishermen are out trying to make up the difference when, hungry and cold, they are faced with a hard moral decision. They have come upon an iceberg shipwreck with six desperate stranded men who swim over and try to board the small vessel. The crew is led by Odessa Young’s Eva. Just last Winter, her husband Magnus was taken by these same inhospitable waters leaving her in charge of the expedition. They must now make the unconscionable choice to fend off the men and bury them in six coffins lined along the shore, setting into motion a series of events that begins a bone-chilling descent into madness for the crew.
It’s not about to get any warmer. The Damned is an austere horror movie channeling Robert Eggers (complimentary). Dark lighting and a frigid fog permeate every frame. Director Thordur Palsson approaches Scandinavian folklore as a slow burn, the central tension burns like ice in the veins. It goes too slow, if anything, for a movie that relies on psychology to develop its feeling yet leans on jumps for its cheap, but sometimes effective, payoffs.
Odessa Young, for her part, creates her own gravity and holds up the center of the frame. The good trick of the movie is that it plays from her perspective. What we see, reality of chilling delusion, are from her increasingly unreliable perspective. If it had more than the inevitability of the haunting, a kind of uncertainty in the story and not just the expression of the ghostly fishermen, there would at least be somewhere else for the movie to go.
In its cold-as-ice perspective, The Damned hopes to catch our breath in our throats and exasperate the audience. Just as often, the film itself seems to be burdened its insistence on rising tension. The problem is that it rises and stops, rises and stops, and then doesn’t have anywhere else it should go. They do the fishermen in early on, they’re haunted by them, then they try to get rid of them later. It’s all bottled up fear that nearly snaps from its own bolstered up one-note anticipation.
What’s best about The Damned is the scenic joy of the fjords and that it lives inside its wintertime aesthetics. Thordur Palsson effectively finds ways to use setting as motif and to bake in the feeling of horror by atmosphere. It’s a pretty good looking movie when it’s not too dark to care.
Thing is, January is generally genre movie dumping season. This does not necessarily have to be true of horror, a genre that does not need any qualitative metric to find an audience — the specificity of a kind of horror, like Scandinavian folklore is enough to find an audience who wants that. And the genre is typically not aligned with much awards play outside one or two special cases a year out of hundreds of horror releases. So, let’s open up January; release movies like The Damned in this window, efficient little pot-boilers of tension that have one trick and do it sufficiently, but that’s the whole ticket. If that’s enough, you’re already ready for a frozen expedition through tortured psyched, and if it’s not, it never will be.