by Oscar O’Sullivan

Look, you can make a movie where nothing happens – as long as there’s a good reason for nothing happening. The Damned is simply not the kind of film where nothing should be happening. Picture this – an Icelandic fishing outpost, utterly isolated in the dead of winter, ignores a foreign ship sinking nearby and leaves the sailors to perish in the icy sea. Shortly afterwards, strange and unexplained occurrences make some among them believe that they are being haunted by the Draugr, an undead evil that wreaks horrible revenge on the living. If this sounds too interesting, don’t worry – the film takes great pains to make sure you will no longer be interested by the end. The perfect set-up for an Evil Dead-style gore-fest or a paranoia thriller in the vein of The Thing is instead used in a misguided attempt at emulating the work of Robert Eggers – and in doing so, unintentionally illuminates why this type of film only works under very specific circumstances.

Illuminate may not be the right word – this film is drowned in shadows, clearly aiming for ‘realistic’ indoor lighting but ultimately turning any scene that doesn’t take place outdoors into a sludge of muddy colours and lost detail. The still, composed camera is the right choice for capturing the gorgeous landscape they’ve been given to work with, not so much for creating fear or tension during the films’ many belaboured “scary” sequences. Worst of all is the score, a serviceable droning thing that becomes eye-rollingly obvious whenever there is action onscreen. Here’s the well-worn pattern – the main character is working or sitting silently when, oh heavens, she glimpses something that vaguely looks like it might be scary! The instant we see what it is, or perhaps even before we get a glimpse, the score explodes into wailing strings and frantic noises that drown out everything else in the film. Then we cut to our hero doing her best horrified expression and/or running away. It’s jumpscare 101, and becomes positively comedic the twenty-fifth time it happens with no consequences. While the film explains that every person at the outpost is being mentally tortured by visions from the Draugr, we have to take their word for it, as only the visions suffered by Eva (Odessa Young) are shown to us. While the men of the outpost quickly crack under the pressure one by one, turning to murder and suicide, Eva is battered by visions for practically the entire runtime and remains essentially unperturbed – is this on purpose, or is Odessa Young just not a very good actress? The ending would only work if you buy that she’s been out of her gourd the entire time, the complete opposite of the level-headed stability she actually displays on screen. Speaking of the ending, it’s like a final punchline at the end of a torturously long joke – right after Eva shoots the Draugr and sets the outpost ablaze, we suddenly witness the same scene again except this time she is killing an ordinary man. The final reveal of the film is that there was no supernatural element and that all the unexplained happenings were caused by a surviving sailor creeping around their camp, stealing food and making strange noises. By this point my eyes had rolled all the way back into my skull. I mean really, it’s nonsensical. Plenty of the tangible occurrences can’t be explained by this revelation (why in the hell would he steal and eat every single fish they have in one night rather than one at a time? Is he stupid?) and, as I said already, nothing about the performance or writing make me believe that Eva was in any way unbalanced, so predicating the ending on her being stark raving mad is completely unfounded. Not that the film would benefit from a straightforwardly supernatural ending either, but half-assing a “twist” like this to try and dazzle your audience is just insultingly hacky work.

I go into Irish films wanting to like them, of course I do, but there really is no way to polish up a turd like this. An Irish production of an Icelandic folk tale, performed in English by Australian lead – there’s nothing cohesive or coherent about the way this project was put together or presented. The period trappings are a surface level distraction, an illusion undone by the generic patter of the dialogue and the way everyone stumbles over basic Nordic pronunciations. The film fails to do anything interesting on a surface level or impart any subtler meaning, bandying about a cast of characters as flat as a sheet of ice but plonking them in a story that behaves as if it’s the second coming of the art of drama – you can’t enjoy them being gored to death, but you won’t have any reason to feel sorry for them either. When people clapped at the end of this I nearly choked laughing. Just because you saw it in a festival doesn’t mean it was good. 3/10.