Remember that spooky campfire tale that opens John Carpenter’s The Fog? It’s an old-fashioned yarn about a wrecked ship deliberately sacrificed to the sea with the crew all returning to the shore as vengeful ghouls preying upon the descendants of the guilty citizens in the port town. Well, that seems like an inspiration for the plot of The Damned, a quietly intense horror film directed by Thordur Palsson. It even features the nighttime fog that rolls in, seeming to bring the vengeful ghouls in with it.
An internationally produced chiller set and shot in Iceland, The Damned concerns a young widow named Eva (Odessa Young), who’s inherited from her late husband, Magnus, a remote Arctic fishing settlement. “We shouldn’t be here” is the first line in the film, spoken in voice-over narration, and we have to agree with her when contemplating the bleak isolation of the snowscape.
The fishing has been going badly all winter, and she and her crew of men are down to eating the fish they’d been saving for bait. At that precarious time, they witness a ship foundering on the jagged rocks they call “the Teeth” at the far end of the bay. There’s an argument about whether they ought to try to rescue the survivors, with helmsman Ragnar (Rory McCann) making a fierce case for leaving the passengers and crew to their fate rather than sharing the last of their food only to all starve together. But it’s Eva’s decision — she owns the boat and employs the men — and she decides she won’t risk her men’s lives to save the lives of strangers.
That fateful choice seems to spell their doom, which they compound by taking their boat out the next night to search the waters after the ship’s gone down, seeking any barrels of supplies that might tide them over. To their horror, there are still survivors clinging to the rocks of the Teeth, screaming for help in a foreign language. As Ragnar orders the crew to turn their boat back to shore,…
Auteur: Eileen Jones
