Every movie must have a signature picture, and slow-burn supernatural chiller The Damned has a doozy: a physique washed ashore reveals surprising indicators of life, a stirring within the midsection … however shock, slash the bloated abdomen open and there’s an eel in there, wriggling about and presumably feasting on guts. Sadly nothing else supplies fairly so fulsomely gothic a second, which is a disgrace, as a result of it’s an arresting flourish.
Set in Iceland through the nineteenth century, The Damned is extra about environment and buildup than set items or supply. The plot is light-touch. There’s a shipwreck off the coast the place a tiny fishing group are barely scraping by. The group have a selection: attempt to assist the shipwrecked individuals or allow them to perish. The extra humane characters wish to assist whereas the extra pragmatic ones level out that they barely have sufficient meals to maintain themselves, and that including 20 newbies to the combination would threat hunger. The pragmatists win the day however, after they flip their backs on their fellow people, a sequence of eerie visions and mysterious deaths unfolds. Is an Icelandic folkloric spook out to get them, or is the supply of their troubles extra prosaic?
With its ethical conundrum involving boats filled with those who want serving to, it is perhaps tempting to deduce a up to date parable on this materials. However the apparent parallel with weak migrants making an attempt to safe assist from rich international locations doesn’t get up, as a result of these Icelandic of us are so brief on assets. They may starve in the event that they take within the shipwrecked mariners; there are not any billionaires right here hoarding sufficient dried salt fish to final 10,000 years.
So whereas it might have extra punch as chilly horror-drama than allegory, it’s a decently put collectively movie. Director Thordur Palsson has assembled a well-cast gang of plausibly historic actors, acquainted from the likes of Recreation of Thrones. Odessa Younger is the standout as Eva, a younger widow with a core of metal, and she or he carries us by to an ending that twists the knife, dramatically talking, as an efficient and memorable conclusion.
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