Review by
Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Thordur Palsson
Starring: Odessa Young, Joe Cole, Lewis Gribben, Siobhan Finneran, Francis Magee,
Rory McCann, Turlough Convery
Accordingly, it is not just physical malady which exposure to extreme cold
entails but also cognitive dysfunction, with temperatures of just -5c
having significant effects on not only our ability to process thought but
also our emotions, too, creating a responsive hypothermia of debilitating
tension and anxiety (preludes to the sort of paranoia which the snowy
thriller deals in). No wonder then that our glossary for death is so
synonymous with frigid lexis - we are "iced," as "cold as the grave" - and
that in the "dead of winter" we hang swathes of electric lights about the
house, all colours, to palisade against the bleak and unforgiving dark.
Books such as Michelle Paver's masterpiece 'Dark Matter' exploit frozen
milieus for the suspicion and hyperbole which the white isolation
engenders, while cinematic urtext, John Carpenter's remake of
The Thing from Another World, refocussed the mistrust and psychological instability of John W.
Campbell's original novella (republished recently in full as 'Frozen
Hell') and intensified the threat from within through a brutal iconography
of ice-stiff beards and blood on snow. Would Fargo have had
the same destabilising nihilism without its snowy environs: a film based
on a true story but with its foreboding look as flat and white as a page
with no words on?
Thordur Palsson's (story/director, with screenplay duties courtesy
of Jamie Hannigan) The Damned showcases its crisp
Icelandic location (the director is a native, who brings his inherent
understanding of inclement environments to the film) of thick-blue water
and sky set against sharp white mountains of ice; a vivid monochrome which
dwarves the 19th century inhabitants of a tiny fishing village, a knife
edge existence where the men think of nothing other than their "next day
at sea." We follow Odessa Young's Eva, a young widow who now
assumes the lead of the mainly male community (one of the film's pleasures
is the general acceptance of this social system, without the tedious
misogyny other narratives may have expounded). Eva's husband had promised
"a land of opportunity," yet on midwinter night the men are reduced to
eating the very chum they have saved for bait. Accordingly, it falls upon
Eva to make the difficult decisions, such as whether to acknowledge a
sudden shipwreck just off the coast. Even before the eventual folk horror
which the wreck entails, there is the pressing question of whether the
group's meagre supplies will extend to any survivors; probably not, so
what would be the point of rescue? Palsson creates a palpable sense of
lived in harshness, a world where death already fringes fragile existence
like frost as Eva, perpetually clad in mourning dress, carries the dead
weight of her community on her tiny shoulders.
With its focus on character and relations (via idiosyncratic performances
from its largely British/Irish cast, including Siobhan Finneran and
Francis Magee, aka The Orgazoid), The Damned has a
distinctly literary feel, a last ghost story for Christmas, emboldened by
the devastating cinematic sweep of its exteriors and the close, tangerine
glows of its claustrophobic sets, which are as tenebrous as if composed by
a Dutch master (the atmospheric photography is by Eli Arenson, with
Stephen McKeon's score bringing Hammer-esque bombast). The horror
is inaugurated into this austere mise-en-scene when bodies from the wreck
wash ashore. As honourable men, the fishermen attempt to bury them... but
the stomach of one victim pulses strangely; something lives within...
This initial body shock drifts into a cool creepiness as the island is
seemingly invaded by a dark energy, glimpsed only in foreboding shadows as
it picks each of the inhabitants off. "At night, it tries to get in 'ere,"
laments Finneran's cook, implying that the threat is parasitic, or perhaps
psychological (a single caveat: I'm not for the explication that the film
makes in the final scenes, which all but undoes the pristine ambiguity of
the preceding narrative). Tales such as the ones told to raise morale in
early scenes take on menacing shapes of their own in the intensifying dark
and cold, where stories are all the crew have to make sense of the
unremitting gloom. And thus, poor Eva, with the village's number
depleting, is duly haunted by the creepy knocks and swelling umbras of an
Algernon Blackwood heroine in this genuinely unsettling ghost story.
Betrayed by omens and auguries its beleaguered characters may be, but if
the year's first horror is an indication towards 2025's genre quality,
then The Damned is a welcome portent.
The Damned is in UK/ROI cinemas
from January 10th.
