Film Brain shudders at this icy horror film set in a remote fishing outpost, but alas the ending leaves him cold in a different way than intended.
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00:00Things are about to get chilling in Bo-Censor, the word, in the horror film The Damned.
00:05Odessa Young stars as a widow in charge of a fishing outpost after her husband's death,
00:10which is enduring a brutal winter with barely enough supplies to feed the crew.
00:14When a ship wrecks nearby, it brings a wave of terrible misfortune upon the fishermen.
00:19The film is mostly about the theme of guilt, which eats away at the fishermen,
00:23who choose not to rescue the survivors of the shipwreck because of their own situation,
00:28and their superstition starts to give way to suspicion,
00:30believing that they've been cursed with a dragor, a vengeful corpse.
00:34But death looms large at the outpost even beforehand,
00:37knowing they might not all make it through the winter,
00:40and Young gives a solid performance as a woman still processing her own grief
00:44and making decisions with a group of rowdy fishermen.
00:47Thorda Palsen, who created Netflix's The Valhalla Murders,
00:50is clearly drawing from the likes of The Lighthouse and especially The Thing,
00:54with the icy setting given a brutal beauty by Eli Aronson's excellent cinematography.
01:00But it works most as a slow burn ghost story,
01:02with an angry spirit hiding in the shadows and leaving wet footprints,
01:07punctuated by shocking, sudden deaths.
01:10Which makes it so disappointing that The Damned botches the ending,
01:13trying to go for a commentary that feels rushed and cack-handed,
01:17instead of being hauntingly ambiguous.