On February 6, a dark folk-horror film «The Damned», co-produced by the cinemas of the UK, Iceland, Ireland, the US and Belgium, will be released in Ukraine. This is the feature film debut of Icelandic director Thordur Palsson, who previously worked as a showrunner on the Netflix series «Murders in Valhalla» (2019–2020). In the review below, we analyze how scary it is to watch the unhurried course of events on the screen.
Genre folk mountain
Director Thordur Palsson
Starring Odessa Young, Joe Cole, Lewis Grabban, Siobhan Finneran, Francis Magee, Rory McCann, Thurlow Convery, Michelle Og Lane
Premiere movie theaters
Year of release 2025
Website IMDb
In the second half of the nineteenth century, a young widow, Eva, inherited a fishing station from her deceased husband, Magnus, located in a remote area of Iceland among snow-capped cliffs. This year, the fishermen working there faced a particularly difficult time: due to extremely harsh weather conditions and the inability to fish steadily, they faced a shortage of food.
One day, on a fairly fine day, they are confronted with a disappointing scene when Eva and everyone else witness a shipwreck. And now the bewildered heroes have to make a quick decision: rush to the rescue of people who are about to freeze in the icy water, or let things go to their devices, as there is already a catastrophic shortage of food. The responsibility for this choice falls on Eva because she is the one who manages the station and, accordingly, its employees. The girl decides to be guided by pure pragmatism, which, however, risks regretting for the rest of her life.
The truth, as always, lies somewhere in the middle. The debut full-length by Icelander Thordur Palsson is hardly the kind of music that makes you want to crunch on fragrant air-corn in a relaxed way, but given the genre, it’s more of a compliment.
From the very first frames, the viewer is greeted by an oppressive atmosphere and Nordic gloomy landscapes of a rocky island washed by a cold, indifferent ocean.
It is noticeable that the local fishermen have a hard life even without any emergencies, and after the shipwreck and their subsequent actions, strange and terrible things begin to happen on the spot. The disfigured corpses of the dead wash ashore. The crew, and Eva herself, begin to see ominous ghosts. Helga, the cook, begins to intimidate the living dead from Norse mythology — draugrams. One of the wooden coffins where the dead bodies were placed magically emptied.
Despite this, Thordur Palsson is far from the screamers and ghosts that jump out of the closet that characterize the genre. Instead, he builds a slow, drawn-out narrative through hints and mysterious figures in the shadows, relying on an overwhelming sense of hopelessness and gradual madness that engulfs the doomed men and women. The boundary between the imaginary and the real is blurred, and the location, remote from civilization, puts even more pressure on the psyche of the unfortunates. In fact, the poor people have nowhere to go.
From the standpoint of this context, Palsson’s film looks at least competent, and from a technical standpoint, it is a good movie. The picture here deliberately tends to be uncomfortable. The distraught woman walking among the cemetery crosses, located under the terrifyingly overhanging leaden clouds right on the shore, makes us recall the recent «Nosferatu». And the music by Irish composer Stephen McKeown, which enhances the overall anxiety, changes to grave silence in the most tense moments.
Of course, «The Damned» — is not the greatest slasher (and the flame here is really slow to ignite) and certainly not a revelation in auteur cinema. The local techniques will seem familiar to a sophisticated viewer, and the film is hardly outstanding on the level of meaning.
The emphasis is not on scary monsters jumping out from behind a corner, but on an oppressive atmosphere of hopelessness, which makes it difficult for viewers accustomed to purely genre performances to endure the movie. On the contrary, predicting the ending is not such an impossible mission. In any case, it is much easier than the choice that fell on the frail shoulders of the desperate Icelandic young lady.
