[Tribeca 2024] THE DAMNED -- The Dull

Review by Daniel Lima

For the whole of human history, storytellers have explored and exploited the horror of isolation. Be it the lonely echoes of an empty home or the dark recesses in the midst of a vast wilderness, what the mind creates without the comfort of company is often vastly more terrifying than any monster or demon. What the mind creates is also more interesting than anything in The Damned, a period horror film that attempts to be an evocative, atmospheric descent into madness and comes up with nothing at all.
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Odessa Young plays a young widow in 18th-century Iceland, running a small fishing outpost completely cut off from the outside world in the cold winter months. As they slowly starve through an unsuccessful season, a large ship wrecks within sight of them. Electing not to lend help, the outpost soon finds itself haunted by a being out of old Norse legend, and the inhabitants begin to turn on each other.

It is clear that The Damned​ will not win any awards for originality or screenwriting. From just this premise, anyone with a passing familiarity with modern trends in horror cinema knows exactly what to expect: a slow burn, quasi-supernatural threat that could be interpreted as a manifestation of guilt and trauma, completely within the characters' minds. To that end, the film never tips its hand fully one way or the other and so never allows itself space to distinguish itself from any number of other works, at least on a purely narrative level.

This is not, by itself, such a big problem. A film like this lives and dies on the world it can build. On paper, that shouldn't be an issue here: with such a unique setting and a small ensemble forced to spend a lot of time in one location, there is ample opportunity to craft a rich, insular little community with fully fleshed-out characters.

Unfortunately, the immersive quality this breed of survival horror begs for is constantly kept at bay by conventional filmmaking form. The score constantly announces how the audience should feel and ruins the ambiance that the sound design should create on its own. The stark beauty of the Icelandic landscape should be an almost ironic backdrop for such a bleak tale, but the bland cinematography does nothing to capitalize on the grand expanse. Numerous cheap jump scares litter a film that should be all about a creeping sense of dread. All these minor flaws ultimately create a sense of artifice that breaks any semblance of naturalism.

Worse yet, however, is the characters. There are not many of them; they spend basically every moment of screentime with one another, and yet they are all utterly indistinguishable beyond one or two traits: the woman-in-charge, the love interest, the kid, the superstitious crone. These stock archetypes simply do not suffice in a film about the deteriorating mental states of its ensemble, where death is constantly waiting in the wings and would represent a staggering blow to a community without bodies to spare. By the end of the film, I found myself struggling to figure out why I should care what happens to any of these people.

Ultimately, this speaks to why The Damned​ doesn't work. It's an atmospheric film with no sense of atmosphere, psychological horror with no minds to interrogate. It has nothing original to say about the state of the world and no themes to explore that haven't been tackled by a plethora of more engaging films. It's the kind of movie you forget about almost as soon as the credits roll. ​

The Damned is screening at the 2024 Tribeca Festival, which runs June 5-16 in New York City.

Rating: 1.5/5