‘The Damned’ Review: Icelandic Fisherman Reckon with Their Sins in a Glacially Cold Morality Play

A trip to the cinema is an excellent way to pass a winter evening, but it does come with one potential drawback. After braving the winter chill for a brisk speed-walk from your parking spot to the entrance (and avoiding slipping on black ice along the way), the theater’s climate control and comfortable seats can make you temporarily forget how cold it is outside. Thordur Palsson’s directorial debut “The Damned” looks to rectify this problem, as the Icelandic horror film is singularly focused on making its viewers feel the frigid cold that permeates the bones of its characters. From icy landscape shots to midnight huddles between characters that do a middling job of preserving body warmth, Palsson immerses his audience to the point where you can almost feel the mind-numbing cold that pushes his subjects to the brink of madness.

If that strikes you as a remotely pleasant way to spend your free time in January, there’s a lot of enjoyment to be found in “The Damned,” a slow-burning work of psychological horror that’s more interested in exploring humanity’s capacity for guilt than jump scares or gore. Set in the late 1800s against the unforgiving backdrop of Iceland’s Westfjords, the film follows a crew of fishermen who begin to reckon with the fact that nature is gaining ground on them after a punishing winter. The fishing station is owned by Eva (Odessa Young), a teenage widower who took over the operation after her late husband’s death. As she surveys her starving crew, who have begun to eat the small fish they set aside as bait, it becomes clear that relief from hunger and the elements is not coming any time soon.

As Eva and her helmsman gaze out to the sea one morning with the hope that the ocean will deliver an unexpected miracle, they end up spotting the opposite. Another fishing ship appears on the horizon, but its sailors made the fatal mistake of steering into an iceberg. The strangers cry for help as they plunge into the frigid waters, and Eva is left to make a choice. The six fisherman could be saved and brought to shore, but saving their lives would place an insurmountable strain on her already dwindling resources. With her crew divided by the moral dilemma, Eva makes the quick decision to let the men parish. Her crew pillages the ship for any remaining resources, but their only reward for their betrayal of principles is some lamp oil and six bottles of brandy.

The six caskets that are soon placed on the shore become an inescapable reminder of the choice that the crew made to prioritize their own survival. The guilt slowly builds throughout the camp, and rumors about the appearance of a folkloric creature known as the Dragur begin to emerge. An invisible entity that haunts the doers of evil deeds, the Dragur is said to bury itself in the souls of its victims until they purge their sins with fire. As the fishermen resemble themselves less and less every day, Eva must reckon with the lingering effect that her actions had on the souls of everyone around her.

The plot that slowly unfolds focuses on the subtle ways that opening the door to evil can rot a community from the inside. The scares are mostly metaphorical and the sparse imagery becomes repetitive by the end, but “The Damned” remains a promising debut that offers a moody exploration of the human condition. Young gives a superbly conflicted performance, embodying the burdens that come with being a young woman in a role that society never expected her to take while leading an imperfect group of people through an impossible situation. And Palsson and screenwriter Jamie Hannigan mine the juxtaposition between harsh conditions that turn us into animals and the humanity that lurks beneath to great dramatic effect. Mother Nature might not care what you have to do to survive — but whether or not we care to admit it, most of us answer to a higher power that does.

Grade: B

A Vertical release, “The Damned” is now playing in theaters.

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