Eva’s winter is going worse than yours. No Wi-Fi, no groceries, no husband, and now a ship full of half-frozen strangers has the nerve to crash nearby and ask for help. Thordur Palsson’s The Damned is folk horror for people who like their morality plays icy, brutal, and occasionally very funny in a “wow, that’s bleak” sort of way.
Frozen Morality Play in a Box
Set in a 19th-century Arctic outpost, the film traps a small crew in a fishing station so isolated it makes “remote work” look like a nightclub. Widowed Eva (Odessa Young), trying to keep her late husband’s operation alive, presides over a ragged group of men who are one empty barrel away from chewing on the furniture. They’re down to eating bait. Not “times are tough” eating — bait.
Then they see it: a shipwreck on the jagged rocks called the Teeth. Survivors are clearly clinging on out there, in the freezing dark. And this is where the movie calmly walks into its central nightmare: if you don’t have enough to save everyone, what kind of person do you have to become to save anyone at all?
Eva’s decision to leave the survivors to die is not played as a lightning bolt of evil. It’s a slow grind: the math doesn’t work, the mountain pass is blocked, the food is nearly gone, and no one else wants to die for strangers. She chooses her crew over people she doesn’t know — and The Damned spends the rest of its runtime politely dismantling her soul for it.
Draugr, Guilt, and Other Local Wildlife
After a barrel of salt pork washes ashore, Eva leads a night raid to scavenge more from the wreck. Of course, the survivors are still there, desperate and feral, and things go horribly wrong. One is killed by Daníel, Ragnar is dragged into the sea, and what little humanity was left in this tiny community goes overboard with him.
When the bodies wash ashore and somebody finds a corpse full of live eels, the film slides fully into folk horror. Helga, the cook, breaks out the Nordic lore: draugr, revenants born of hatred, the kind of undead you absolutely do not want to meet in a blizzard. Burn them, she says, or they’ll rise.
From there, things get “less than ideal” very quickly:
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Food vanishes overnight.
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Helga disappears.
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An empty coffin turns up where a body should be.
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Everyone starts acting like they’ve been locked in a freezer with their worst thoughts.
Is it a draugr? Is it cabin fever? Is it collective guilt eating their brains from the inside? The film refuses to give you the comfort of a clear answer until the end — and even then, it leaves just enough weirdness to make you side-eye your own rationality.
Odessa Young: Patron Saint of Bad Choices
Odessa Young is the anchor here, and she absolutely nails it. Her Eva is neither a saint nor a villain, just a person making impossible decisions in a place that punishes every choice. She’s practical to the point of cruelty, then haunted to the point of paralysis, and the movie lives in that tension.
What makes her performance so strong is how ordinary she feels. She’s not a Final Girl with a secret action-hero skill set. She’s the one who stayed behind after her husband died and kept the books. Watching her try to carry the weight of these lives—and deaths—on her narrow shoulders is excruciating and weirdly compelling.
There’s an almost darkly comic logic to her arc:
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Make the least-wrong choice.
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Suffer anyway.
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Repeat.
By the time she’s stalking through the fog to “confront the draugr,” you’re not sure whether you want her to succeed or just be allowed to stop.
Men, Madness, and a Very Bad Winter
The crew is a beautifully miserable bunch: Ragnar the stalwart helmsman, Daníel the increasingly unhinged killer, Hákon hanging onto sanity by a thread, Jónas, Skúli, and Aron all slowly buckling under hunger, fear, and suspicion. This is not a group therapy retreat; this is emotional Jenga with axes and ice.
Once Helga vanishes and the empty coffin is found, paranoia floods in like the tide:
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Hákon tries to strangle Daníel.
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Aron kills Hákon.
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Daníel later attacks Jónas, then slits his own throat.
If you came for a cozy chamber drama about community, this is the part where the film gently shows you out. The horror isn’t just in the spectral figure lurking at the edge of the frame; it’s in watching rational men become dangerous animals in slow motion.
And through it all, the script threads a brutally dry sense of humor: a sense that the universe, if it could talk, would shrug and say, “Well, what did you think was going to happen?”
Folk Horror Without the Fancy Dress
One of the joys of The Damned is that it’s folk horror without the usual visual excess. No maypoles, no flowery pagan rituals. The “folk” here are fishermen in ragged coats, and the “horror” is starvation, isolation, and stories about things that crawl out of the sea when you’ve done something unforgivable.
Helga’s draugr lore isn’t there just to spice things up. It’s the cultural lens through which these people understand catastrophe. If your world is ice, darkness, and drowning, of course your monsters are vengeful sailors who won’t stay dead.
The film’s horror set pieces are often surprisingly simple: a foggy burial hill, a frozen corpse, a dark cabin lit by wavering lamps. It doesn’t rely on jump scares; it just slowly ratchets the dread until the crack of a floorboard sounds like a gunshot.
That Ending: No, You Don’t Get to Feel Good
When Eva finally “kills the draugr” and burns the cabin, it feels like classic horror catharsis: monster slain, fire cleansing the curse, survivor walking off into the snow. And then the film calmly wrenches the rug away.
We see what actually happened: the “draugr” was a desperate Basque survivor, offering his gold watch and begging, in a language Eva couldn’t understand, for her boat. She shot him. She burned him. She finished the job the Teeth started.
It’s a nasty, elegant bit of storytelling. The phantom she’s been hunting is the guilt she couldn’t bear to name. All the folklore, all the fear, all the talk of revenants — it’s how she and the crew tried to make sense of the simple, unforgivable fact that they abandoned people to die.
So no, you don’t get a neat monster defeat. You get a woman who has done something terrible and now has to live with it, alone in a world of ice.
Beautiful, Bleak, and a Little Bit Funny (In a Horrible Way)
The cinematography makes full use of Iceland’s landscape: vast, indifferent seas, jagged rocks, and snow that turns every horizon into a blank tombstone. The setting doesn’t just look hostile; it looks bored of human problems. You can almost hear it saying, “You all came out here to die dramatically. I’m just providing the backdrop.”
That’s where the film’s dark humor lives: in the sheer indifference of nature versus the grand drama humans think they’re having. The men argue about honor, duty, and survival while the sea just keeps rolling, occasionally throwing corpses back to shore like, “You dropped this.”
Final Verdict: Misery Done Right
The Damned isn’t here to comfort you. It’s here to ask what you’d do if forced to choose between your people and strangers, then show you that whichever way you decide, something inside you is going to rot. It’s grim, but not empty—there’s a moral spine running through it, even as the characters’ moral compasses snap in the cold.
If you like your horror slow-burn, beautifully shot, emotionally devastating, and spiked with bitter little jokes the universe plays on desperate people, this is absolutely your kind of punishment. Just don’t watch it while you’re hungry. Or planning a winter fishing trip. Or thinking too hard about whether you’d get in the boat.
