Thordur Palsson’s The Damned premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2024 before the movie was released to American theaters back in January. That’s when a strange thing happened: critics loved the film, but audiences kind of hated it. The movie comes to streaming with a wildly disparate Rotten Tomatoes score of 90% positive reviews from critics, but only 47% approval from audiences. Is The Damned a dark, period horror film that brings the atmospherics of a thriller to a dramatic natural setting, spotlighting a stand-out performance by a young actress in a story of storms and superstition? Or is it one big meh?
The Damned is set in 19th-century Iceland. It follows Eva (Odessa Young), a widow who inherited her late husband’s fishing operation, during a brutal winter. When a ship sinks off their frozen coast, Eva and the fishermen have to make a life-or-death decision: rescue the survivors and deplete their already meager supplies, or let the shipwrecked perish to ensure their own survival.
Director Thordur Palsson crafts his feature debut around this conscience-challenging choice and its psychological aftermath. The fishermen become convinced they’re being pursued by supernatural forces — specifically the Draugur, vengeful undead from Icelandic folklore. But what makes The Damned more than just another standard addition to the now long-lived folk horror film revival, is its ambiguity about whether the terror actually is supernatural or merely psychological. Are the events on screen actually occurring in the world of the film or is everybody just freaking out in the darkness, cold and guilt? Like Robert Eggers’ period movies or even John Carpenter’s frozen frightener, The Thing, Palsson understands that the most effective horror comes from exactly this uncertainty. The film relies on practical scares — moody lighting effects, claustrophobic sets — rather than computer generated spectacle. It uses the familiar trappings of historic horror to deliver a meditation on how we create narratives to cope with personal trauma and even collective moral failure. The Icelandic setting provides enough frosty cinematography to make the cold feel bone-deep, and the cabins that make-up the hand-hewn fishing outpost come to feel like a haunted house, shaken and stirred more by the spirits of the living than the dead.
Odessa Young delivers a tough portrait of Eva as a woman grappling with impossible leadership decisions in an unforgiving world. Young and Palsson sidestep every Netflix girlboss cliché to bring audiences a feminine character who naturally feels like she belongs — for better and worse — in a harsh world of ice and commerce, salty sailors and slimy fishing boats. Young’s Eva is young and pretty, but mournful for her dead husband and hardened by their lives of snow and darkness and danger. Just like most of the fishermen, I didn’t question a single decision she makes, and her relationship with the crew never feels forced or unnatural.
The salt and the spray — and even the almost black-and-white setting, given all the snow and night photography — might put The Damned’s viewers in mind of Robert Egger’s nautical freakout, The Lighthouse. But The Damned is really more like Egger’s debut, The Witch. This is a movie about supernatural horrors, but its grounded in the permafrost of all-too-human flaws, foibles and fears. The Damned is a film about an isolated community with meager resources, facing tough decisions and living with their consequences. In that respect it resembles a lot of the stories readers find here in The Contributor. And perhaps The Damned will find its most lasting appeal as an analogy for the hard choices that affect the lives of the poor and isolated among us today.
The Damned is streaming on Hulu
Joe Nolan is a critic, columnist and performing singer/songwriter based in East Nashville. Find out more about his projects at www.joenolan.com.