Sumptuous cinematography isn’t enough to elevate this familiar folk horror, even if it is legitimately creepy.
★★★☆☆
Folk horror is a surefire bet for scares. Perhaps no one does it better than mariners, their superstitions infused with a salty pungency observable in The Damned. This feature debut from native Icelander Thordur Palsson taps into the fearsome sorcery of folklore, but through the guise of a by-the-numbers survival horror.
Set in the piercingly cold Westfjords of Iceland during the nineteenth century, a group of crack-knuckled fishermen, led by sharp widow Eva (Odessa Young), bear witness to the sinking of a ship a stone’s throw from their base. Low on provisions, the fishermen leave the ship and its crew to drown, only to be met with supernatural consequences bundled with their guilt. Disarray spreads throughout the group as the fishermen are stalked by sopping wet spirits out for revenge.
This guilt is particularly felt thanks to Palsson and cinematographer Eli Arenson’s panoramic engulfment of the characters in the brutally cold environment. Each bitten lip and picked nail is backdropped by plains of blinding white snow and ice, forefronting the near-translucent bodies of the sailors, ready to rupture forth blood and demons. It’s truly a feast for the eyes and senses, evoking the material fears that folk tales manifest so effectively.
Yet the narrative doesn’t come close to matching the film’s visual flair. There are multi-pack archetypes—Siobhan Finneran as the old crone, Joe Cole as the damaged love interest—surrounded by monster fodder, all of whom travel down a well-trodden spiral into depravity. The conspiracy, backstabbing and general hysteria that spreads through the once tight-knit camp is chilling, but familiar and never shocking.
Echoes of The Terror, the AMC series about two nineteenth century vessels stranded in the Antarctic, only further highlights The Damned’s limited narrative. Where that show, admittedly with a higher budget, reached into the peacocked chests of its characters and lifted out their bulging hubris for all to see, The Damned fails to unearth anything about its characters above a half-baked (and prematurely terminated) romance. Where the similarly brutal television show probed divisions in gender, class and race, all textbook themes for the nineteenth century setting, The Damned doesn’t realise any such depth despite opportunities to do so.
The Verdict
Regardless, the needling dread The Damned induces is undeniable. No matter its narrative shortcomings, the technical mastery and performances of anguish and misery from the cast unlock a horror that gets under the skin. The purpose of a lot of folk horror stories is simply to scare, to throw up an imposing shadow on the wall for a captive fireside audience. This does that well, but when sharing narrative space with others which have pushed the subgenre into exciting new territories, it’s hard not to see this as a defrosted serving of more of the same.
Words by Barney Nuttall
The Damned is in UK cinemas from 10 January
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