It’s 19th-century Iceland and young widow Eva (Odessa Young) is in charge of a small isolated fishing outpost. Despite a so far unsuccessful season and dwindling rations, the crew keep their spirits high by spending their evenings drinking, singing sea shanties and telling stories by candlelight.
While working out in the cold, barren landscape Eva looks out to sea and notices a ship sinking on the dangerous collection of rocks where her husband lost his life. There’s talk among the crew of taking out the boats to try and rescue any survivors, but Eva is wary of losing further men, and decides against it.
When a barrel of supplies washes up on shore, Eva agrees to take a boat out that night so that they can search the nearby waters for more. But they are surprised to discover a group of men who survived the sinking ship and are now desperate to board the already fully loaded boat. As the fishing crew desperately try to flee the scene, fighting breaks out and lives are lost.
The next morning, the bodies of the crew have washed up on shore and the fisherman place them in wooden coffins which they line up on ice due to the fact that the ground is too hard for them to be buried. There’s a pretty gruesome scene involving one of the bodies and talk of The Draugur, old Nordic folklore that surrounds the spirits of the dead returning to seek vengeance. And sure enough, strange things do start to happen to the crew – unexplained shadows and sounds in dimly lit rooms, hearing voices in their heads – and then death begins striking them down.
With its bleak, isolated setting and initial setup, I was definitely intrigued and keen to see how this all played out. But sadly The Damned proves to be just another dull, slow-burn, allegorical movie that fails to land its ending. The score regularly dominates, as it tries to demand how the audience should feel and interpret a scene, and the cast is so barely fleshed out that, aside from Eva, I couldn’t really distinguish between them at all, let alone remember their names.
The Damned will be available in UK Cinemas from 10th January
Where to Watch
6.1
Web developer by day, with a movie and TV watchlist that continues to grow as much as my spare time reduces! My favourite movie is Inception and, despite what everyone says, I do not have a man-crush on Tom Cruise.
