hiuslots ‘The Damned’ Review: The Very Deep Midwinter

Something about a wintry Icelandic landscape makes you feel as if you’ve slipped into another dimension — snow so white it’s almost blue, craggy peaks, frigid black water. “We should not be here,” Eva (Odessa Young) says at the start of “The Damned,” and you can see why. This is a landscape so large and prehistoric that humans seem like intruders. Sooner or later, the land will rid itself of them.

Eva and her husband owned a fishing outpost on this remote 19th-century Icelandic coast. But her husband has died, and Eva, still a young woman, is now running it alone. So she cooks and monitors and manages the operations, including a group of rough-hewed but kindly men who fish with her boats. Her closest friend is Daniel (Joe Cole), but she is still for the most part alone. This winter, though, has been brutal — the weather is excruciating, and everyone is worried about making it to spring. There are not even enough provisions to get them through; they’ve taken to eating the bait.

One day, while readying the boat for another day of work, Eva and the men spot in the distance a large sailing ship that is sinking, nose-first, into the icy water. They stare, horrified. There are people on that boat, and those people will die without help. Eva must make an impossible decision: Do they rescue the men, whom they cannot feed, and thus risk their own starvation? Or do they let them sink so they may make it to spring?

This is the simple moral dilemma that kicks off “The Damned,” directed by Thordur Palsson (who also wrote the story for Jamie Hannigan’s screenplay). Such a title makes you ask questions: Who are the damned ones here, and who is doing the damning? The movie gives us options for answers. Certainly the outpost itself seems damned by the terrain and the weather, the buildings battered and barely holding together. The men on the boat are damned twice over — once by a God who allows their ship to run afoul of the landscape, and once by the fishermen and Eva, watching from shore.

But the fishermen and Eva seem to damn themselves, and the rest of the movie concerns what it really means to be condemned. This is a horror film, and for the most part a primally efficient one. Daylight is so bright that the colors feel washed out, and creepy sights — like eels tangled with the intestines that spill out of a corpse — are more shocking and bleak without shadows to hide them.

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The full scope of the inquiry into the mayor is not publicly known, and it remains unclear why investigators were seeking information about the additional countries or whether Mr. Adams has had dealings with them. But the investigation has focused at least in part on whether, in exchange for illegal donations, Mr. Adams pressured the Fire Department to approve a new, high-rise Turkish Consulate in Midtown Manhattan despite safety concerns. Investigators have also examined free flights and flight upgrades the mayor received from Turkish Airlines.

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