The Damned // 1st Movie of The Year

A 19th century widow is tasked with making an impossible choice when, during an especially cruel winter, a ship sinks off the coast of her impoverished Icelandic fishing village. Any attempt to rescue the survivors risks further depleting the starving villager's supplies.

This is directed by Thordur Palsson, and stars a couple of solid character actors. If there's one thing a horror movie can do well that gets me invested immediately, it's deliver an atmosphere that engrosses you, gets you sucked in, and utilizes the location. Well, some horror movies, they're all green screen, but most of the time, they're taking a solid location with hopefully some really good production design and getting you invested in that, making you feel the chills running up and down your spine while you're watching.

There are some scares, some of them that are delivered very well, shocking, unexpected, others that you can kind of see coming. It also utilizes the weather of the location as a character or really just a way to progress the plot or hold things up to a degree that our characters are struggling with. I mean, they're struggling with a lot in this film, whether to believe what is actually happening or not. And then when the shipwreck happens, it throws another wrench into a quest for survival with these characters.

And I just thought it was handled really well. And this very small crew, they are struggling with the thought of starvation entering their minds already. But once this ship sinks they have to decide that they definitely need to go above the shore.

There's this mounting sense of dread that this movie provides so well that it kind of reminded me of a Robert Eggers movie. Now I'm not saying as a whole, the quality is there because I do think this movie struggles with two very specific things, but just the look and feel to it, all the sense of atmosphere that you get in an Eggers movie.

And I love the color tones in this film, that blue, that just makes you feel distant, but also claustrophobic in a way, because of how they're approaching these characters who at first hear the legend of what could be happening here. And they're like, “ah, we're not going to worry about it.” But as things start to go bump in the night, you get that sense of dread along with our characters that does start to build and slowly becomes creepier as the movie progresses.

And again, it's a January horror movie. I wasn't expecting all of this. Now I said the movie struggles with two things, and it does become a more prominent issue as we get closer to the end.

It's only 90 minutes long, but it does kind of crawl at times. The pacing is extremely slow, and I believe that's the intention here, but it almost undercuts the end result kind of what we're building to. And then this story does feel a little repetitious.

I started to feel the same as scenes would pass and characters would become uneasy and decide whether they're going to believe in this or not, or how they're going to approach this, their mentality, if you will. But ultimately, the morality of everything that we're dealing with here is interesting. And I thought the way that they approached that was nice.

This director, these actors, really solid performances, a couple that aren't Oscar worthy, but all in all a really nice job from the cast. And then just the way you're invested in the location and the weather and how that adds in and factors in. I like this movie.

I think it was a nice surprise because I went into it expecting nothing. But I finished the movie, actually being impressed with it.

It lingers and repeats ideas too often for its own good, but the impact is there. And again, there are issues absolutely for a 90 minute film, maybe a few too many for some, but I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. Thanks for reading 👍

Images source IMDb