Chilly Icelandic Horror The Damned Is Worth a Shiver

You can say this, for The Damned, the feature film debut of Icelandic director Thordur Palsson: It understands the shivery allure of a classic ghost story. And not only that, but it understands the captivating allure of being physically present for a great ghost story, to be able to glance around at your fellows as the storyteller weaves an unbearable web of suspense, everyone lost in a sort of trance, their present circumstances utterly forgotten. Palsson and cinematographer Eli Arenson capture one of these moments early in this story of fishermen at a remote outpost who will eventually tangle with the dual threat of guilt and madness, a brief indication of the spirit of camaraderie that might exist in such a small, tight-knit group in better times. As an old caretaker tells a tale to chill the blood of all the assembled fisherfolk, Arenson captures the wondrous mix of delight and awe in those Spielberg Faces with slow, patient zooms. In doing so, he preserves the characters as they fortify their bonds against the ever-grinding ice, the absence of fish, the oppressiveness of hunger and disease. Tonight, they celebrate their shared connection. Tomorrow? Perhaps they throw it all to the howling winds outside their flimsy fortifications.

That’s the essence of The Damned, a tidy and chilly English language horror film shot on location against the majestic, sharp-toothed peaks of the Icelandic coast, which jut up like the jaws of some terrible beast ready to devour these poor souls. You simply can’t overemphasize how much of a boon that landscape is for the film’s ability to evoke mood, particularly on what was presumably a modest budget and minimal FX–the Icelandic locations allow for a steady procession of lovely but lonely imagery, often highlighting the utter insignificance of a solitary human speck against walls of ice or snow that seem to rise toward the heavens. In what is otherwise a pretty straightforward, 90-minute psychological horror film with a seemingly supernatural bent, it’s the natural world that ultimately does the heaviest lifting, and there’s nothing wrong with that–Palsson was right to take advantage of the raw power and terror this place conveys.

As suggested above, our characters are mostly weathered fishermen who have seen plenty of hard times before, which lends them both a fortitude and perhaps a sense of overconfidence that their latest trials can be overcome if they simply tighten their belt and forge ahead. The fish have always returned in the past, after all–surely they will again? But The Damned pushes forward, beyond mere questions of profit and personal wellbeing, and into the realm of ethics, survival and damnation, when the fishermen spot a doomed ship off the coast that may be host to some survivors. What responsibility do they have to such strangers, when their own food supply has already been stretched to the breaking point? How do you pick up survivors, when they threaten to swamp your boat in their panic? And can you blame those poor sailors for cursing you, if you elect to leave them to their grisly fate?

These weighty, guilt-packed decisions of survival logistics fall to an unlikely leader: Eva (Odessa Young), the widow of the company’s former leader, who died in an accident the season before. She’s no fisher, leaving that task to sailors like the grizzled Ragnar (Game of Thrones’ Rory McCann) and Skuli (Francis Magee), but as the actual owner of their fishing boat–the one item of any concrete value in this place–she’s unquestionably the one who is actually in charge. This is something of a refreshing novelty, for a period horror film of this sort–it would be unusual enough to have a female lead in a horror film with this kind of wilderness setting, but it’s even more uncommon that this character have a genuine authority among the men who surround her. They look to her for her brutal pragmatism, her acknowledgement that she must consider every one of the factors in her responsibility to their mission and to each individual crew member as she makes decisions. Taking everything into account, launching a rescue mission for those stranded men is just too much of a risk for Eva to authorize. But ah, what about the life-giving supplies they might find among the wreckage?

As if the title of the film hadn’t made things clear: Transgression was obviously in the making. The crew does what desperate men are wont to do, and it’s not long before they begin to suspect that they’re being punished by infernal forces for their inhumanity–that something worse than ghosts now walks among them, the undead draugr of Icelandic and Scandinavian folklore as the dead men of the ship return for revenge. Our structure, then, is like a two-part John Carpenter special: One part The Thing’s antarctic research station, full of grumbling guys ready to turn on each other at a moment’s notice, and one part The Fog with its wronged crew of ghost sailors. Add a dash of The Grudge and you’re about there, with Eva as the tormented figurehead being made to pay the price for the burden of leadership. Australian actress Odessa Young deftly juggles her need to project authority to retain the respect of the men with the vulnerability and grief she’s carrying for the still-fresh death of her former husband, even as she seems to be forging a distinct intimacy with one of his former friends. Of course, there’s not much time to flesh out that relationship, especially once men in the encampment start being picked off one by one by a creature that may or may not be a case of mass hysteria.

The Damned is at its best when reveling in the ethereally creepy series of omens and portents that make up its middle sections, highlighting the impending sense of inescapable doom that has descended on the outpost–when corpses of the scorned sailors wash up overnight, the squirming belly of one is cut open to reveal several writhing eels have somehow worked their way inside in one particularly gross moment. These bits feel like details ripped from the very sort of seafaring ghost stories that so effectively conjure up that feeling of both community and dread in the film’s early moments. Where the film eventually stumbles, on the other hand, is in not having quite enough time to make the descent into madness feel entirely justified or earned, and not knowing precisely what it wants to achieve once it drags its characters down into their collective pit of guilty despair. Rare is the instance when I suggest that any modern indie horror film could actually benefit from being longer rather than shorter, but The Damned could use a bit more of a gradual build in its suspense, something to allow the relationships of the men to more realistically deteriorate and morale to fester. As is, things in the encampment go from “we might have a problem” to “we’re all going to die” with an alacrity that misses a chance to build more of the dread that we feel earlier, when the threat is less tangible. I wouldn’t mind seeing these guys more fully embrace the paranoia that would have them at each other’s throats.

Still, The Damned gets by more than well enough via the elemental strength of its moral dilemma and the pristine beauty and unrelenting inhospitality of the Icelandic wilderness that is its scene-stealing star. At the very least, it’s enough to make one grateful for a warm blanket and mug of tea on a cold winter’s night, and the freedom to dismiss the howl of the wind outside your door as simply an element of the natural world, rather than an approaching undead revenant bent on your destruction. Got to appreciate the little things, right?

Director: Thordur Palsson
Writer: Jamie Hannigan
Stars: Odessa Young, Joe Cole, Siobhan Finneran, Rory McCann, Turlough Convery, Lewis Gribben, Francis Magee
Release date: Jan. 3, 2025

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.