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| Odessa Young in The Damned |
A tale of guilt, terror and psychological breakdown in desperate circumstances, The Damned is set in a remote part of Iceland in 1871, but a few details aside, it could really be any time in the past thousand years. Life is dominated by snow, wind and waves in a hard winter. It’s a narratively simple film which stands out because it’s so well crafted, and quickly has viewers shivering too. Shortly after its release in UK cinemas, I met director Thordur Palsson to discuss it.
“When you start developing stories and films, you know, you never know what's gonna stick, you know? You start working on the story, it goes in the drawer. You start working on it again, it goes in the drawer. And what always had an effect on me, but also my collaborators – I worked really closely with my two producers and the screenwriter, Emilie [Jouffroy], Kamilla [Hodol] and Jamie [Hannigan] – we always felt that this story had a very interesting dilemma of ‘What would you do if you were put in this position?’
“The Damned is about a fishing outpost with people that get snowed in for the winter. They barely have enough food for themselves, but they're going to be all right, probably. But then they see a ship sunk off their shores, and these poor foreigners are drowning in the ocean, and they have to make a decision. Do they go out and save these foreigners and bring them back, and they will surely starve and die because they barely have enough food for themselves, or do they just allow them to drown and let nature take its course? The decision is Eva's to make. She’s our lead. She's the woman who owns the fishing outpost, and she decides to not save these poor people and to let them drown. And then strange things start to happen in the film.
“That was always the initial idea. It took us eight years to make this film, from inception to delivery, so that was always what was carrying us through the film, through the process. Yes, it's a psychological horror film, but the thing it's talking about is still as relevant today as it was back then; the fear of the other. Do we take care of our own? So it is very much topical. And I think when you have a story that you connect with in that way, and hopefully the audience do also, that's what keeps you coming back to it and developing it over all of these years.”
At a moral and psychological level, it’s marked by tension between modern values, Christian traditions and much older beliefs and superstitions.
“I'm not religious in any way. But the way I look at religion – and you talked about superstition, paganism and certain elements that we have in the story – is that I really understand people that are searching for answers. I think a lot of people come from a very difficult upbringing or difficult circumstances, and often there are no answers to why life is as hard as it is, or ‘Why did I lose my husband?’ or ‘Why did I lose my child?’ And I understand why people gravitate towards religion for answers, because it gives you answers, and reality often does not. There is no rhyme or reason to why you are going through what you're going through. I think even more back then – the film is set in 1871 – you gravitate towards your religion and any means that you have to try and make sense out of things that you can't make sense of.”
Are the characters also affected by the psychological and cognitive effects of having too little food?
“Oh, very much so,” he says. “Desperation makes you do strange things. Personally, I've never experienced hunger – not really. I've never experienced hunger and then knowing there is no food to have. I don't think ‘Oh, I didn't have lunch today’ is real hunger. So for people to be going through that and the circumstances that they're in, it does affect people's perception of reality. And the whole film is seen through Eva's eyes. The script is designed that way. We shot it that way. The whole film is how Eva perceives things, how she sees things. She's the one that makes this big decision in the beginning of the film to not save the people. So to add hunger on top of all of these things, the guilt and everything thing, it adds elements to her decision making as the film goes on.”
I tell him that I think a lot of filmmakers in that situation would have gone down the conventional route of having people doubt the authority or power of a woman and of having the group fall apart and its members be much more antagonistic towards each other. But these are people who have to work together all the time to survive, doing the work that they do, so was he aiming to tell a more realistic story?
“Exactly.” He nods. “More realistic. I guess it's all about ‘What's the film really about?’ Not to get lost in things that can be really interesting, everyone turning on one another and ‘This is the leader, let's kill the leader,’ and whatever. Like, load of lies or whatever. We weren't really interested in that. And also, we weren't really – I mean, there are gender dynamics, definitely, but it's not overt. It's not ‘You're a woman and I'm not going to listen to you.’ It's none of that.
“There's other things in it. She's actually more educated than the men. She's seen more of the world than them. So there's a lot of trust that they have in her, that possibly even leads to trusting her too much. But yeah, we weren't really interested in doing the ‘Oh, it’s dangerous for a woman to be alone with men’ story. That's not what the film's about.”
The people come to believe that there is one creature that's out there that's a threat to them. We see any number of films these days with lots of monsters. What’s the trick involved in making an individual threat like that as scary as it is in this film?
“Have great collaborators help you!” he says, laughing. “I mean, it all stems from the script. Jamie Hannigan wrote a fantastic script, and if it's not on the page, you won't be able to shoot it. And it's psychological. So my job is to put the audience into her shoes. And if she is getting more scared, hopefully the audience is getting more scared. So it's just these little steps of creating that and figuring out a way to capture it visually – Eli Arenson, the cinematographer, and myself. You know, ‘Is this a safe space? Is this not a safe space? How do we show that? Can we trust this? Is there something lurking in the shadows?’
“There isn't one real way to answer that, but the more I've spoken about the film, the more I find myself saying that if you don't have a good script, you won't ever have a decent film. So, yeah, I think it stems from the script, but then all the different collaborators, from the cinematographer to the composer to the sound designer to the colourist when we're grading the film. It’s everyone.
“I'm the one that needs to be shepherding people in the right direction of what we want the film to be, but it's all the collaborators trying together to find what the film is. Because it is very true that you write one film, you shoot another, and then you make a different film in the edit. And this was very much that. Things changed. We had to pivot really hard on set. Things went wrong. And then the same thing in the edit. We had to change a couple of things to make sense of it.”
What was the set like? How much were they actually shooting in hard conditions?
“We drove for 11 hours in a coach, everyone together. Then we stayed in this small seaside village in the west fjords of Iceland for six weeks. No one could leave. It was really cold. I lost the sensation in both my big toes, it was so cold. I got the sensation back – it took a couple of months, though. Nerve damage, I guess. But the actors, they had to endure the horribly cold North Atlantic wind that comes by there, and then freezing period costumes where there's no space to put any padding anywhere. So they're just looking at a person that's holding a really nice jacket just off camera, you know? ‘Wait until he says cut. We'll get this on you.’ While I'm there in my nice warm jacket, like, ‘You're doing great!’ But everyone was really up for the challenge.
“Everyone understood this is not like a Hollywood production. This is an indie film. We won't have any assistance for these actors. Everyone taking care of themselves. There are no trailers. It was just one really nice little family. All the crew and the actors, from the PAs to the runners, we were all eating dinner together, drinking beer together, going on weekend trips together, swimming in the ocean. So there were no hierarchies or anything like that. It was just us together in a small town trying to make a film.”
There’s a great lead performance from Odessa Young. I mention that I saw her a year or two ago in Manodrome. She has quite a small role in that, but she does an enormous amount with it.
“How I work as a director is that casting is everything. I don't believe in getting a performance out of an actor. I cast someone who I can see in their eyes is that character, in a way. There's an aura that they bring to anything. And you have that by having a cup of coffee or Zoom or whatever it is with them. And I believe that my job as a director on set is just maybe reminding them where the character is coming from, if they have strayed away from what the character was actually being.
“So that's how I look at directing, versus me chiseling away and getting something, or tricking actors or anything like that. So I was very, very, very, very, very, very lucky to get all of these actors together to trust me and go make this strange film. Odessa Young, I had seen three of her films before – I guess it was Assassination Nation, Shirley, and then after our first conversation, I had seen Mothering Sunday, but I'd also seen another one called The Daughter. I love Australian films, and she's Australian. And even since we worked together, she's made really interesting things.
“She's a chameleon. She's never the same. You watch Mothering Sunday, Assassination Nation and Shirley, and this is not the same actress. What is this? Like, how does she do this? And I thought it was very important for Eva to constantly have a mask on to hide her vulnerability from the men, because this is very, very, very difficult. It’s a different kind of world she's living in. It’s very dangerous because of the life and death situation that they face. And from our first conversation, she just had something. She was mature beyond her years. You can feel it in her. There's something in her eyes. And she's a young actress. I just connected, and I was lucky enough that she said yes, alright. And then the other actors slowly came on board.”
He really didn’t know what audiences would think of the resulting film, he says. When he watches it, what stands out most is all the mistakes he made and the things he could have done differently.
“It is really nice to see that people are connecting to the film because it is kind of a strange little film in a way,” he says. “Yes, it is psychological horror, but it's very dramatic. It's very much about the human condition, and it's very much about the thematic elements of guilt and the mistakes we make. So it's so nice when people connect to it and that people want to recommend it. It's like, even better. A lot of people put a lot of, you know, sweat, blood and tears into this film, so I just want as many people to watch it as possible.”
