Somewhen in the 19th century, at the snowy shores of the icey waters way up North: Eva (Odessa Young) runs a very remote fishing station she has inherited from her deceased husband, formerly the whelmsman of the station. Since this is her first year without her husband, this isn't exactly an easy job for her, made all the harder that she and her crew (Joe Cole, Rory McCann, Lewis Gribben, Francis Magee, Turlough Convery, Micheál Óg Lane) and her cook Helga (Sibhan Finneran) face a particularly hard winter that makes every fishing trip a gamble and forces the station to start feeding on their bait for lack of fish to even feed themselves. Then one day they see a ship wreck an island over, and despite that ship's crew shouting out begging for help, Eva decides against it, given their very dire food situation that would starve everybody should they take on any more mouths to feed. And there's an uptick to this even, the next morning Eva finds a barrel of meat has washed from the shipwreck to the shore, which really improves their food situation. She and whelmsmen Ragnar (Rory McCann) decide to take the crew on a trip to the spot of the accident to see if they can salvage a bit more food, but they're attacked by some survivors just desperately trying to make them save them. The attackj is averted, and the next day a number of corpses is washed ashore, corpses our heroes put in coffins but can't bury as the because the ground's frozen solid. Helga is spooked by this and warns the rest this will awaken a demon, the Draugur (Andrean Sigurgeirsson), unless a certain ritual is performed. The others consider this nothing but superstition, and really first the station's fortunes turn to the better when they find rich fishing grounds, so much so that they suppose they can just party a night away. The next day, they find all their provisions gone, and they find one of the coffins empty, so suddenly Helga's story makes sense. Only, Helga's gone as well, and all they find when they go searching for her is some of her belongings, enough to make them think she has been killed. And soon our heroes, and especially Eva, feel spooked by something that they can't ever quite see let alone grasp, but that seems to get into all of their heads, creating dissent among them. And when there's dissent in a stressful situation, death is sure to follow ...

In pure writing, The Damned doesn't sound like much more than your sun-of-the-mill monster movie, but despite using plenty of genre tropes, it sure doesn't feel like one. That's thanks to an intelligent, slowburn screenplay that invariably favours feelings of unease and paranoia over actual jump scares and action, an atmosphere-heavy directorial effort that turns the in itself menacing backdrops into a character of their own, and a strong cast that come across as as convincing as relatable and that really carry the movie. And all this adds up to an utterly unusual but very impressive genre effort.

The Damned will be released to UK and Irish cinemas on January 10th, 2025.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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