A review

It’s a difficult challenge when the story goes bleak to bleaker. The Kafkaesque style that the status quo is dismissal then turns to condemnation in a surreal distortion can be successful if presented the right way. Right off the top of my head I’m thinking of Robert Eggers The Lighthouse. What makes kafkaesque stories work is peppering some comedy throughout to elevate the dismissal. Something I’m always trying to find when I’m reading scripts simply because I find it difficult to write comedy. Something I’m sure might be suggested by others as well, but The Damned directed by and story by Thordur Palsson, written by Jamie Hannigan dares to avoid that. Instead, it sticks to harshness in its tone, theme, and setting without mercy to its characters or its audience. 

The story is about a fishing station long ago, in the way back days of wood boats and oars witnesses a ship sinking out in the sea and decides not to aid or assist the people in danger. A decision that will literally haunt them until each of them meets their doom and might be even if they were to aid the helpless people they let die in a watery grave.

The Damned is a psychological horror (my personal favorite subgenre) and rightly so, but there are other horror subgenre tropes in this that I feel it isn’t just a psychological horror but a hybrid of it and that where I think it falters.  The film does itself a disservice by also inserting the classic slasher trope of jump scares with jump cuts, as well as features of new extremities horror. Additions, I feel pulls away from what the film is trying to express, the long, slow duration of agony knowing you are condemned. Just stick to that,  I totally would be on board with the whole thing. But out of all those cliches, putting in the old, tired, lazy cliche of a dude who has to show a woman how to load and a gun tells proves to me the creators were challenging themselves when making this and constantly playing safe with classic tropes and cliches. I just wished they had the psychology of the audience in mind more than their characters.