Maritime folk stories and sea-fairing tales have long been a fascination of mine, especially adventure classics like Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea,” or Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.” But Robert Egger’s 2019 nautical nightmare “The Lighthouse” has seemed to bring horror back into the ocean's shores.
Here we have “The Damned,” an Irish and Icelandic period film that drips with salty terror and dread onto a fishing outpost in Iceland in the 1800s. Widowed Eva (Odessa Young) runs the outpost with several other shanty-singing fishermen and staff (including “Game of Thrones Rory McCann as Ragnar, and “Downton Abbey”’s Siobhan Finneran as Helga), when, during a fishing shortage due to the freezing temperatures, they witness a ship sinking on the horizon All agreeing that there’s nothing to do to help, they continue trying to fish. But when bodie begins washing up on the shore, Helga fears the coming of the “Draugr”: a flesh-and-bon harbinger of doom. Her warnings are ignored, and the worst piles onto the outpost.
The horror in this film feeds on what we hear and see, but not so much giving everything away There’s a deep-seeded mystery here, between the real and the cerebral, that wiggles its way into the shadows and has you questioning, “Did I just see that?” “The Damned”’s landscape is hauntingly beautiful, featuring ice-blue waters and snow-capped peaks in the mountains. I wouldn’t blame anyone for feeling frozen just from watching this, thanks to Eli Arenson’s brilliant cinematography. But what really shines aesthetically is the swelling score by Stephen McKeon. The music is dreadful but bears tinges of sorrow, serving almost as its own harbinger of doom.
The performances and direction (from newcomer Thordur Palsson) push this film past the generic moody period horror films that we seem to be saturated with and usher it to the front of the line when it comes to the must-sees of 2025. Odessa Young in particular steals the film in what I can only argue as her best performance to date, seething with both fear and obstinance, grief and tenacity. What culminates is a gripping seaside cautionary tale that properly kicks off 2025 for another great year of horror films.
Jacob Scheer