When I was growing up in the North of England, I was told that sailors wouldn’t learn to swim. Why postpone the inevitable, they would say? You fall in waters cold enough to turn to ice, better to drown quickly than freeze to death – or, worse, to be dragged free of the water and still die of hypothermia. There was a bleak pragmatism to that mindset, an acceptance that the task at hand can turn deadly quickly, and it’s core to the chilling terror of The Damned,
Eva (Young, Assassination Nation, Monodrome) is learning that philosophy fast. Widowed, she’s now the owner of her late husband’s fishing boat: that makes her the de facto leader of the small fishing station on the farthest, most snowbound reaches of the Icelandic coast in the cold, cruel winter of 1870. There’s been no time for tears – they’d freeze anyway – as her tragedy has been swallowed up by a harsh season. The giant racks on which fish should be salted and drying are empty and battered by the wind. The crew of the tiny rowboat has been reduced to eating bait fish for sustenance. Worse, the coffins of the crew of a sailing ship that wrecked on the rocks lie above ground too solid to dig up, a constant reminder of a dreadful day. Maybe that’s why dark dreams plague the men, and station cook Helga (Finneran, Downton Abbey) speaks of the draugr, a vengeful Scandinavian spirit that crawls in where guilt and shame live.
In his debut feature as a director, The Valhalla Murders creator Thordur Palsson lets the icy-blue pitilessness of the inhospitable Westfjords permeate every frame and every moment. Even with the menace of the draugr, the storytelling of this icebound survival horror owes more to the ghost tales of his homeland and the restrained, understated existential angst of fellow Scandinavians like Strindberg and Ibsen than it does to The Thing. However, if there is a kinship with Carpenter’s chilly classic, it’s in the depiction of working life in these extreme places. There’s no point complaining about the cold or the damp or the perpetual threat of dying from simply being there: Palsson instead finds the ruggedness and determination to survive in such a place. Theirs is a stoicism that’s unbalanced by the shades of a supernatural intruder, one that exists in dreams and out of the corner of your eye. Even if it is a corporeal presence, its biggest menace is how it drags at the guilt-ridden souls of the community.
A profound element of The Damned’s harsh realism is that Eva is never clad in “final girl” rags, but in the same working clothes as the men. Simply by being there she has proven her worth, and while the fishermen may call her “miss,” it’s never a diminutive. If anything, the tragedy is that she must remain removed as the quiet-spoken but unquestioned leader, her passionate tension with her late husband’s best friend, Daniel (Cole), forever denied release. Ibsen may not have recognized these humble quarters, but the crushed embers of passion would definitely resonate with him.
What Palsson is really tackling here is that intersection between the real and the arcane. This is a culture in which monsters are real in the way that waterspouts are – you may never see one, but you’ve heard of them, and you must be prepared to deal with them if you’re ever so unlucky. It’s the converse of the idea that it’s best to drown: that your shipmates are willing to let you sink below, for your sake and theirs. There’s an implacable wasteland here, captured with awe and dread by cinematographer Eli Arenson (The Watchers, Lamb). Yet it’s best represented when reflected in the slow, bloody, tragic collapse of this tiny band of companions in the long, low shadows of those coffins. It’s a harsh lesson: Let some things slip beneath the water completely, lest they drag you down with them.
This article appears in January 3 • 2025.
