Damned if you don't, damned if you really don't
dir: Thordur Palsson
2025
To be clear this isn’t the flick from 1967 made by the great communist aristocrat director Luchino Visconti starring Dirk Bogarde; this is a recent flick by an Icelandic director set in Iceland in the 1870s about a bunch of people at a fishing station trying to do some fishing and then bad things happen to them.
I hadn’t heard of fishing stations either, but I guess they were a thing at some point in human history? A lot of Nordic looking people wearing black in the most forbidding environment you can imagine outside of Antarctica talking about fish and the sea like they know the sea hates them?
That must have been a thing, else there wouldn’t be a terrifying movie like this about such a scenario.
Unlike the last horror flick I saw that had some people being tormented near the sea, this flick has a well-crafted story with compelling performances from decent (mostly) character actors confronting the unknown with sheer terror and a tremendous sense of foreboding. And even involving a group of people even Ingmar Bergman would think should lighten up, anything you shoot in or near Iceland is 1000% more compelling, and makes these people seem more credible.
Eva (Australia’s Own Odessa Young) is a young widow whose husband died a year ago. She owns the fishing station where these grimy chilly souls are trying to do their thing. It’s the middle of winter, so it’s not like they can leave, and they haven’t had a good run lately. In terms of stores they only have fish left over for bait, and they’re resorting to eating that.
While preparing to fish one grim morn in this land of giant mountains, they spy a vessel that has come too far north, that doesn’t know these waters, that strikes and sinks on some treacherous shoals. Of course your first instinct is to go and save them, but the Captain (Rory McCann) thinks it would put the whole crew at risk of death. When his second-in-command and son Daniel (Tom Cole) yells that it’s not his decision, it’s the owner’s, the owner, being Eva, regretfully agrees with him.
The thinking is, the rationale is, they barely have enough to sustain themselves: if they save a bunch of shipwreck survivors, they can’t feed them, so they’ll all die. It sounds cruel but there’s a certain logic to it.
Of course when a barrel of salted pork appears on the shore, and the contents are still edible, the thought then becomes, almost a day later, that any survivors would have perished by now, so they could probably collect a bunch of other useful suppliers before the changing tide sends everything elsewhere.
Even if one could credibly argue that they haven’t yet done something unforgivable, either a crime or a sin, just to get all judge-y, when they elected not to save the theoretical survivors, once they traipse over there for their own self-interest, and some survivors swarm them, and they have to fight them off, in the process losing their captain, it’s another story entirely.
Morally, it’s the Icelandic Trolley Problem of whether allowing something theoretically bad to happen, and then deliberately doing something terrible that harms a bunch of people, even if it was in the interests of self-preservation, is worse. Had they stayed where they were, the morality of their actions remains questionable, but once they actively go over there and actively cause harm, well, you do the moral math.
It’s not just a bunch of washed up bodies they now have to deal with, and the loss of the captain. It’s the crushing guilt of what they’ve done, and none are exempt from it, not least of which being Eva, who feels like she caused it all by not trying to rescue them in the first place. One of her crew, her peeps, is an old salt called Helga (famously non-Icelandic Siobhan Finneran), who a dab hand at cooking but also always ready with an old tale about something horrible that happened back in the day. She knows the old ways, and speaks of something that is now coming after them, because their actions mean they’re cursed, and a draugr, a supernatural creation pure of hate has been born.
That’s the thing when terrible things have happened, you’re drowning in guilt, and bad things keep happening, whether you believe in something terrible and evil or not. Even outside of the movies, we know how we create our own realities. They have folk remedies for folk terrors, and they may bring them some comfort to have an amulet here or do some dispelling rite over there, but what if people keep dying, and you keep seeing this terrible creature, that looks maybe like a person, in every dark corner, every bank of fog, in every dream and waking moment?
Sure, we with our 21st century minds and prejudices would say, well, the draugr just an embodiment, a physical manifestation of their collective guilt for their collective shame, but they all see something independently in the corner of their eyes, and people are dropping, well, not like flies, but like people trying to survive in an inhospitable terrain that clearly hates humans.
It’s hard to fight the evidence of your own eyes and ears, but while I will say that this flick succeeds in creating an atmosphere heavy with dread, we aren’t watching a generic horror flick where an implacable killer kills and kills again until no-one is left. Not to spoil, but this is the kind of flick where it’s the people themselves who feel they’re cursed doing anything and everything that makes it all so much worse.
As grim as this sounds right from the start, it’s not an entirely grim experience. These people are getting by in a difficult place, but they have their joys as well. One of the sweeter elements of the story (which make it all the sadder down the track), is the tentative way Eva and Daniel move towards each other, craving each other’s company and touch, only to shy away because of convention and because of, yes you guessed it, guilt!
Guilt is the so-called negative emotion that really gets a solid work out in this flick. Eva had been grieving her husband’s death for a year, so she doesn’t have more time for grief, but now it’s just like waves and waves and tonnes of guilt, each action and each attempt at redress only making things worse and losing more members of the crew, and making her feel more guilty.
Let’s say that you’re cursed. A cheery thought. Let’s also acknowledge that you’re not, in actuality, but you’re still convinced you are. Is there any difference? If you thought you were doomed because of something that you did, and even the people telling you it must be bullshit are dropping like flies, at some point you must think “yeah, we deserve this”. And when someone gives you an old solution to the problem, being “burn it with fire”, and someone else, someone more modern tells you “Jesus is the way, we need to honour The Jesus by putting up some crosses, that will do the trick”, well, I know where my sensibilities are more likely to align.
And then the flick pulls its final trick, on Eva, the remaining crew, and us. And oh what a crushing revelation it is, in the end, although only we know the full extent of it; the crew not really being any the wiser. And yet, like I was saying, even if they weren’t cursed, even if they weren’t being punished for having failed to render aid when they should have, what difference does it make now, when almost everyone is dead anyway?
Grim, yes it’s pretty grim, and quite terrifying, watching people tear themselves and each other out of fear (and a little bit of stupidity, it has to be said, thought it’s within normal, acceptable human limits). Were they damned because they did the wrong thing, or because they thought sailing to Iceland in winder for some fish was a good idea?
Only time will tell. The real star whenever you make anything in Iceland is Iceland, because it’s like no other place on Earth (except for all the other ones). It definitely does not look like a place where humans should live or be or should be allowed to film things, but what great scenery, eh?
7 times and no music from The Damned was used at all for shame out of 10
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“It’s not too late to ask for forgiveness for what we’ve done.” – but on the other hand, maybe it is? - The Damned
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