What to Watch Verdict

The Damned is a promising debut from director Thordur Palsson with a wonderfully tense sense of dread throughout that loses its momentum at the end.

Pros

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Thordur Palsson is a director to watch out for
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Nails its tone, eerie with a never-ending sense of dread
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A solid ensemble, led by Odessa Young, that nails the assignment

Cons

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Was waiting for a big payoff moment that never came
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An abrupt ending that adds depth but nevertheless feels unsatisfactory

The cliche is drama is easy, comedy is hard. But let’s not overlook the difficulty of horror, a genre that can often swing from hauntingly great to comically bad. In the case of The Damned, a less exaggerated example of that swing came within the movie’s runtime, as I was on board with just about everything until the final moments of the movie that, while not ruining the experience, left me unsatisfied.

The Damned is directed by Thordur Palsson, an Icelandic filmmaker making his directing debut with the 2025 new movie. The story (from Palsson with a script written by Jamie Hannigan) takes place in 19th century Iceland, where a widow leads a fishing crew during a harsh winter. When they make the difficult decision not to rescue men whose ship sinks just beyond their bay, they soon realize their decision may come back to haunt them (literally). Odessa Young leads the ensemble that also features Joe Cole, Lewis Gribben, Francis Magee, Turlough Convery, Mícheál Óg Lane, Siobhan Finneran and Rory McCann.

Palsson, who previously directed the Netflix series The Valhalla Murders, has the goods, crafting a handsome-looking movie and effectively imbuing it with a lingering sense of dread, one that can chill you as much as the frozen landscape of the movie’s setting. Where Palsson, and the movie overall, struggles is landing that final punctuation; hitting the audience with a definitive moment that will linger after the credits roll.

The movie wastes no time in getting viewers in the right mindset, as the story opens in the middle of a harsh winter that has completely isolated the bay where the story takes place and one character’s ghost story portends what is coming for these characters. Palsson’s ability to create and maintain this overall sense of unease throughout while not relying on cheap scares (i.e. jump scares) is what gets me excited about his potential as a filmmaker.

Beyond the tone, style and some lovely cinematography (by Eli Arenson), The Damned also features an ensemble of no big names (the most recognizable is likely McCann, who played The Hound in Game of Thrones), but who all understood the assignment and executed it very well. Chief among that is Young, who plays the widowed Eva now in charge of leading this group of men. Though Eva is in a position that she never expected to be, Young gives her a level of composure that helps her grow into the authority as the world around her descends into darkness, but her own fear — in both the decision she is making as the leader and with the ghostly entity that begins to haunt them — is always just underneath the surface.

All of this is great and will have you interested in the story unfolding on screen, but you end up waiting for a payoff that never comes. And I’m not necessarily talking about a big scare, that’s clearly not the style that Palsson is using here. But (without getting into spoilers) the ending just kind of happens, to the point when the screen faded to black I literally thought, “wait, that’s it?”

That’s not to criticize the story or message of The Damned; it feels rich in Icelandic lore and its message is clear. But how that final message is revealed to us feels inconsistent and jarring to the movie we just watched.

While the ending could have clinched this as an incredibly strong debut, don’t miss the forest for the trees, as for the most part The Damned is an effectively chilling psychological horror from a clearly talented filmmaker.

Watch The Damned exclusively in US movie theaters. The movie premieres in the UK on January 10.