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‘The Damned’ Review: In His Latest Look at America’s Margins, Roberto Minervini Travels Back to the Civil War
Having lived in the U.S. for more than two decades, Roberto Minervini continues to bring outsider insights to overlooked communities in 'The Damned.'
This is the first period piece from the director of such unvarnished depictions of contemporary Southern life as “Stop the Pounding Heart” and “The Other Side,” and yet the quiet, occasionally poetic film feels like a natural extension of the themes and approach of Minervini’s earlier work. The cold ultimately proves as deadly to these Union volunteers as their Confederate rivals, as reflected in one of the film’s most haunting scenes: Two corpses lie frozen in the snow, while their horse struggles to free itself from the line to which it’s been tied. At times, the low-key approach may remind viewers more of Kelly Reichardt’s Oregon Trail saga, “Meek’s Cutoff,” in that both films (set less than two decades and two states apart) provide an alternative to the conventional Hollywood Western.
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