In the Flesh: The Damned

Starving Arctic fishermen on a lethally beautiful sweep of stone and ice, a nightmarish shipwreck, a gruesome revenant limping out of Norse folklore and into reality — The Damned has a lot going for it, at least on a conceptual level. The minute Ragnar (Rory McCann) goes into the water, though, cracks start to open up in that facade. Odessa Young is haunted but grossly underwritten as protagonist Eva, and Joe Cole has even less to offer as fisherman Daniel. There are some good faces in the supporting cast, especially McCann’s, and Francis McGee’s Skuli, but they have little and less to do. It’s mostly foreboding looks and arguments over Christianity versus belief in folklore, charity versus survival. 

There’s nothing specific here, nothing to ground us in the harsh and forbidding landscape and its daily routines. We’re following fishermen, but we don’t see any fishing. They’re Norwegian, as is director Thordur Palsson, but aside from the myth of the Draugr there’s little to place them in that context. We don’t see these people tarring ropes, or checking traps, or weaving nets. We don’t see them smoke or gut their catch. The shanties are decent, and that provides a little bit of color, but there isn’t much beyond it. The sole scene in which the fishing crew take their boat out in an attempt to salvage a wrecked Basque merchantman’s cargo after leaving its crew to drown, only for the survivors to swarm the boat in a desperate rush, is one of the film’s most effective. 

Palsson has a real feeling for tension, and his handful of what I call stare-scare scenes — in which a character sees something that shouldn't be there and stares in silent, trembling horror until another party interrupts — are strong and affecting. His camerawork is adequate. He clearly knows what he has in the surrounding landscape, but his orange and blue color palette makes it feel more generic than it is, and he lacks facility with shooting indoors. What should be a tense standoff feels more like a limp shot-reverse-shot conversation. Shots of the supper table that should feel warm and intimate instead feel rote, like something shot for network television. The Damned may start with a strong hand, but it underplays it from start to finish.