‘The living are always more dangerous than the dead,’ observes a character in this icy noir – and it’s one of this Icelandic-set film’s key themes. It’s the 1870s and psychological torment awaits after an isolated group makes a brutal choice: do they rescue the survivors of a shipwreck or do they prioritise their own survival? With food supplies dangerously low, you can guess where this goes, but it’s tense watching the fallout as each person wrestles with their conscience in punishing snowy conditions.
Shirley’s Odessa Young stars as Eva, a widow who runs a remote fishing outpost and has hired a crew for the winter, which is particularly harsh this year. Nobody really wants to be there, but they’ll take the money and share it with their loved ones when they get back home. If they get back home. After a very disturbing episode, the group starts to fret about ‘draugr’ – undead men who seek revenge.
Draugr are a common feature in Icelandic folk tales and it’s slightly confusing that this is an English-language film with an international cast, yet the implication is that everyone is Icelandic.
Do they rescue the survivors of a shipwreck or do they prioritise their own survival?
Still, Icelandic director Thordur Palsson (The Valhalla Murders) steers the ship with a steady hand and each actor delivers the goods. Young is terrific as the grieving young woman who is naturally emotional but driven by pragmatism in extreme circumstances, and it's interesting that she is the one whom the decision ultimately rests with. While desperately missing her husband, Eva is also desperately missing human contact, as implied by sexually tense scenes with Daniel (Joe Cole), a good-hearted worker. Other cast members include Happy Valley’s always-excellent Siobhan Finneran as the superstitious Helga. At the start of the tale, Helga sets the tone with a suitably eerie ghost story, told by candlelight.
A handsome film, The Damned uses glimpses and visual trickery to unsettle rather than fully scare, though there are a few gross-out moments. While billed as a psychological horror, it may be best approached as a dark drama or thriller, rather than a fully terrifying experience.
But if you invest in its characters, it offers a thought-provoking insight into the depths of the human mind when faced with the laws of survival. It’s grim, but good.
In UK cinemas now.