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‘The Damned’ Review: A Chilly Horror-Drama That Clings to Its Atmosphere for as Long as It Can


Lead actress Odessa Young enhances director Thordur Palsson's 'The Damned,' a metaphor-heavy spook-fest set in a 19th-century fishing town.

The townspeople mostly get along, singing drinking and fishing songs by gas lamps in their cramped pub, but tensions seem to simmer just beneath this pristine surface in the form of masculine rivalries and notions of strength as survival. The question of whether to venture out to nearby, treacherous rocks, where survivors might be stranded, forms the ethical backbone of a story that slowly but surely transitions toward supernatural territory, rooted in legends that brush shoulders with the townspeople’s Christian beliefs. The effect is nauseating, and the film only seems to find stable respite when Eva is around her young, handsome subordinate Daniel (Joe Cole), yielding yet another ethical dilemma when their chemistry becomes palpable.

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