Young's commanding performance is most effective when the pic stays the course without becoming repetitive.

| Original Score: B | May 14, 2025

The Damned may test your patience with its languid pace and propensity for things-that-go-boo cliches. Palsson emphasizes atmosphere over action, but doesn’t give his characters much of interest to do within those atmospherics.

| May 12, 2025

When gimmicks and jump scares have become the mainstream horror norm, a little 19th century spookery is just what the bloodletter ordered.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 5, 2025

A moody moral fable with more than enough spooky flair to spare, The Damned is an ethical dilemma about the inherent ickiness of survival at the cost of sacrificing other humans.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 20, 2025

The Damned is powered along by suspicion, atmospherics and an unforgettable landscape. Young is a capable final girl, her fierceness tempered only by the hint of repressed romance.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 28, 2025

The Damned is a 'slow burn' psychological thriller about a widow leading a group of fishermen with a 'survival of the fittest' attitude in a remote part of Iceland. It's a horror film about the evil that can come from extreme mistrust.

| Feb 3, 2025

The freezing, desolate arctic winter is the most important thing in the movie, the thing that makes everything work so well.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 24, 2025

Coupled with the beautiful yet deadly landscape, moody lighting, and eerie score, The Damned is an effectively unsettling psychological horror that explores the monsters we can become when faced with a fight for survival.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 23, 2025

A 19th-century Nordic thriller rooted in dreary folklore that hardly blazes forward ... Palsson's tiny fishing community haunting bathes in slinking dread.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 22, 2025

The Damned is sparse, a shrewdly observed chiller ... [with] much to explore in the darkness.

| Jan 22, 2025

What may have been intended as a chilling revelation, serves only as a reminder (one becoming increasingly frequent) that audiences are no longer to be trusted with the slightest inference.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 18, 2025

...The Damned feels like it could be a lost gem: a below-the-radar horror film that stays true to its indie roots while generating sufficient scares to warrant a recommendation to genre fans.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 16, 2025

Seeing Young lead the story as a woman amongst a group of 19th century men was believable and refreshing. Her determination to solve the mystery with as many of her crew making it out alive keeps viewers warm in a chilling thriller.

| Jan 15, 2025

“‘The Damned’ is a cerebral film that should be analyzed in film theory courses.”

| Jan 15, 2025

Young impresses as the ethical centre of the piece, and there's solid support from Joe Cole and Siobhan Finneran.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 14, 2025

With a modest budget but plenty of thrills involving spooky 19th-century ships, frozen wastelands, and ghouls from Nordic folktales, The Damned proudly carries on our Gothic horror revival.

| Jan 14, 2025

The Damned is a visually stunning and haunting unravelling of the human psyche.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 13, 2025

The slow and steady pace is often interrupted by moments of high horror, creating a near-tangible feeling of dread that places the viewers directly into the fishermen’s damp boots.

| Jan 13, 2025

First-time director Thordur Palsson, working from a script he co-wrote with Jamie Hannigan, demonstrates a keen eye for atmospheric immersion and a masterful understanding of creeping terror.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 12, 2025

What's really haunting this tiny fishing community? You may not be able that to answer at the end.

| Original Score: 3 1/2 stars | Jan 12, 2025