Hal Kitchen
Sometimes you’ll see a young actor in something and get an immediate gut feeling of “We’ll they’re going to be a star.” I remember watching a young Florence Pugh in The Falling in 2014 and thinking to myself, “We’ll she’s about to be massive.” It’s great getting that kind of thing right. However, fame isn’t a straight line, and sometimes you’ll see someone on that path and it just doesn’t take them where you think. I first saw Odessa Young in the 2015 Henrik Ibsen adaptation The Daughter, where she starred in the title role opposite the likes of Miranda Otto, Paul Schneider, and Geoffrey Rush, where the yet-unknown teenager Odessa was the clear standout among the cast. Clearly great things lay ahead of her. However, despite further demonstrating her talents with starring roles in Assassination Nation, Mothering Sunday, and the underrated Shirley, her name doesn’t seem to attract audiences as it should. Let’s make that our 2025 resolution, eh? Let’s make Odessa Young famous. I’m sorry to say though, that if that does happen in 2025, I doubt it will be due to The Damned. She’s had better vehicles that didn’t do it for her, and The Damned doesn’t exactly scream box office hit, especially with Nosferatu poised to dominate the market for slow-burn 19th-century psychological folk horror this winter.
Since Robert Eggers broke through with 2015’s indie horror darling The VVitch: A New England Folk Tale, there have been a fair few filmmakers who’ve tried to replicate that film’s success. Since most lack Egger’s intensity, weirdness, and chilling atmosphere, few have come close. It may be a shallow reference point with which to contextualize The Damned, a film that has very few actual echoes of The VVitch, at least once you get into the details of it, but it’s very easy to see where that film excels and this one just barely scrapes by. The Damned, not like its 1969 Luchino Visconti namesake, follows a young widow named Eva, who has inherited her husband’s position as the head of a small fishery on the coast of Iceland circa 1870. It’s a particularly bitter winter, and as she tells us in her opening narration, reserves of food are desperately low. Fate intervenes though when a schooner appears on the horizon and runs afoul of the same deadly rocks that took her husband. Faced with a desperate dilemma—and perhaps subconsciously feeling that if no one was able to save her husband, no one else should be so fortunate—she decides not to risk her crew to rescue strangers they wouldn’t be able to feed anyway. Having made her decision, however, guilt begins to gnaw at her and her crew, and perhaps retribution awaits those who leave innocents to die at sea.
It’s a good setup for The Damned and the cast are well suited to it. Young’s naturally sunken eyes ensure that looking haunted comes easily to her. Game of Thrones alums Rory McCann and Francis Magee add some much-needed charisma to the cast, but sadly they’re each underutilized, as is Downton Abbey’s Siobhan Finneran, who was astonishing in Apostasy but isn’t given the focus needed to make the most of her one note as a local doom-saying crone. Director Thordur Palsson makes his feature debut here and struggles to make the most of his claustrophobic interiors, nor does the script ever really give the actors the chance to do their thing. McCann in particular is given much too short a time to make an impact, and not just because he’s The Hound and we want more of him, but the first couple of scenes establish a really strong dynamic between him and Young, a currency the rest of the film is lacking in. He comes off as such a force of nature while she’s so obviously uncomfortable with her position of authority, yet her influence and concern are so clearly needed.
The story of The Damned here isn’t given enough layers and beats to feel worth it. It clocks in at under ninety minutes and doesn’t noticeably drag, but it doesn’t ever truly grip either, with too few surprises in store. The most consistently intriguing element by far is the characterization of Eva. Her loving husband dragged her out to the frozen middle of nowhere and then got himself killed, leaving her alone to inherit his responsibilities to a pack of gruff, superstitious, ale-swilling fishermen. It’s not forced very hard, it never becomes a significant plot element, and although that makes it the kind of subtle detail that would enrich a more substantial film. Here, it’s by far the most interesting part of the film, and I wish they’d made more of it.
Honestly, I think they could’ve gone a lot further in mining the scenario for drama and conflict rather than resting everything on the supernatural. This may sound strange but at times it honestly gave me some Alien3 vibes, with a woman left at the edge of the map to hold together a band of hopeless men while everything falls to pieces and a monster picks them off one by one. Like The VVitch, it’s a random enough point of comparison, but it can help to illustrate where this film falls short, though do not try to tell me the erotically charged scene of helmsman Daniel (Joe Cole) showing Eva how to use a rifle wasn’t directly inspired by the analogous scene in Aliens. If McCann had stuck around longer he and Young could’ve nurtured their Ripley and Dillon style dynamic.
I routinely lament how often a mediocre score can drag down a potentially chilling atmosphere with too many jolts and composer Stephen McKeon’s style might have been fine for Evil Dead Rise but it’s not conducive to the insidious, creeping fear that The Damned is shooting for. It’s only when the music chooses to quieten down and play it subtly that we’re actually treated to a legitimately creepy moment, of which there are one or two throughout the film. With a bit more room to breathe, The Damned might easily have been carried by its atmosphere, performances, and setting. The exterior sequences are some of the best in the film, and it does benefit from the Icelandic locations, even if more opportunities to establish spacial geography would have gone a long way. It’s just missing a real innovative edge, and doesn’t delve deep enough into what strengths are there to turn them into real selling points.
