‘The Damned’ Review: An Icy Descent into Folk Horror

Folk horror finds its tension in the interplay between landscape and popular belief. At its best, the genre builds fear out of the clash between modern rationality and archaic rituals that persist in isolated settings—villages, fields, forests, or islands. In these closed-off communities governed by their own rules, the past remains very much alive, and pagan cults and superstitions function as unwritten laws. The draugr fits squarely within this ancestral mythology: a kind of zombie, ghost, or undead figure that has existed in Nordic culture for centuries. In The Damned, set in the frozen expanses of nineteenth-century Iceland, it becomes a constant presence—whether fantastical or psychological is never entirely clear, but it is always there, lurking.

That Thordur Palsson’s film will be steeped in folk horror is clear from the outset, when Helga, the cook and housemaid, tells a frightening story to a group of listeners who willingly surrender to it. This is no cozy tavern or restaurant, but a remote fishing outpost stranded in the heart of the Icelandic winter. A small group of fishermen live there, led by Eva (Odessa Young), the young widow of the station’s owner. Food is so scarce that their only options are to eat the bait and drink until they pass out. The sole objective is to survive the winter—by any means necessary.

One morning, they spot a ship sinking offshore and hear desperate cries for help. Some argue they should intervene, while others insist there isn’t enough food to take in “ten or twenty more people.” Eva ultimately settles the debate with a brutal decision: they will let them die. From that moment on, the group dynamic shifts, and everything begins to unravel. When a barrel of food washes ashore, they decide to return to the wreck in search of more supplies. They find very little—and instead encounter survivors. A violent confrontation follows, leaving one survivor dead and one of the fishermen lost. When the bodies reach land, they are buried as well.

Despite their precautions, strange visions soon begin to appear, mysteries accumulate, and a sense takes hold that some form of divine punishment has been unleashed—perhaps a draugar, returning to avenge what was done. Eva is plagued by increasingly threatening hallucinations, several fishermen become convinced they’ve glimpsed a shadowy, ghostlike figure moving through the fog, and tensions escalate as guilt eats away at the group. The failure to save the shipwrecked sailors, combined with hunger, fear, and alcohol, creates an ever more suffocating atmosphere. In that climate, the apparitions only intensify the dread—if they are real at all. None of the fishermen, Eva included, seem entirely sane anymore.

The Damned introduces horror gradually, almost imperceptibly, as something embedded in the environment itself. It’s felt rather than shown: in candlelit nights, in the creaking wood of floors, walls, and ceilings, carried by the wind, leaving cryptic marks in the snow. Is a draugar stalking them? A surviving sailor? Or are the fishermen simply succumbing to fear and imagination? There are deaths, suicides, decaying bodies, unexpected encounters, and protective rituals. But do those traditions actually keep the “monster” at bay—or is there a point at which nothing can be done anymore?

A film built almost entirely on atmosphere—an icy one, in every sense—The Damned sometimes leans perhaps too heavily into its quiet, mysterious tone. It aligns more closely with the strain of elevated, auteur-driven horror that has flourished over the past decade than with classical scare-driven genre filmmaking. It’s also a film better experienced in a movie theater than on a streaming platform: its minimal lighting and reliance on shadows demand close attention to faces, sounds, and subtle visual cues that can easily be lost at home.

With a final twist that isn’t entirely unexpected, this Icelandic film—shot in remote locations in Ireland—reveals itself as a period drama concerned with fear of the outsider, of the foreigner, of the immigrant. It explores the prejudices born from that fear and how they can become a lethal force, psychologically corroding everyone involved and pushing them toward irrational behavior. Folk traditions often exist as coded ways of expressing fear of the Other: the different, the unfamiliar, the foreign. And when that fear resurfaces and collides with the present—whether in the nineteenth century or the twenty-first—the results can be terrifying.