Damn debuted at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival as Eight for silver. It was retitled for theatrical release in February 2022. The film tells the story of John McBride (Boyd Holbrook), a traveling pathologist investigating the strange deaths and disappearances of nobleman Seamus Laurent (Alistair Petri) Earth. yellowstoneX Kelly Reilly plays Seamus’ wife, Isabelle. Damn was written, directed and produced by an Oscar-nominated director. Sean Ellis. Ellis tries to breathe new life into an old-fashioned werewolf story by combining an old-time play and a horror movie. Bye Damn successfully copes with the historical part of its genre, horror is ineffective, repetitive and overly derivative.
What is “Damned” about?
There are two great scenes at the beginning. Damn which illustrate its strength as a period piece. The film begins with a realistic depiction of the World War I trench warfare. Viewers are shown the brutality of the battlefield as mustard gas and machine guns slaughter hopeless young people. After the battle, the film cuts to the medical tent where countless victims lay in agony. The camera shows the ongoing bloody medical operations. A man screams as his leg is amputated, and another gushes blood as a doctor pulls bullets from his body.
The film then takes viewers back to late 1800s France and introduces us to the Laurent family. Seamus, the head of the Laurent family, has a land dispute with the Roma clan living on his estate. The gypsies claim to own the land they occupy, and historical records support their claims. After meeting with other influential people in the city, it was decided that the Roma should be expelled by force in order to protect the rights of the Laurents to the land. What follows is the best scene in the movie and yet another prime example of how beautiful a period play is. Damn is.
Seamus and a group of men drive to the gypsy camp to clean them up. While this is happening, the camera stays still and zoomed out. Spectators see the whole camp, but only music is heard. After an altercation between the two groups, violence erupts. Seamus’ men begin attacking the gypsies and their camp. Due to the way the attack is shot, the chaos cannot be fully traced. Wherever the audience looks, there is a different attack. Men and women are shot, tents start to catch fire, and the victims flee in panic into the forest. After the devastation, the camera cuts to Seamus’ children, Charlotte (Amelia Crouch) and Edward (Max McIntosh) singing about true love during a music lesson. It’s the perfect ending to the scene and a great commentary on the differences between the lives of the nobility and the gypsies.
The “damned” don’t praise the past
Damn shines when it demonstrates the uncomfortable and cruel reality of the time in which the action takes place. Many period plays embellish the more nasty parts of their setting to focus on the entertainment side. But Damn doesn’t shy away from showing uncomfortable parts of the past in great detail. It’s nice to see more than drama between rich people in a contemporary play. But the darker tone is not the only reason why Damn excels in this aspect. It is clear that Ellis put a lot of effort into correctly conveying all the historical moments of the film. The costumes, settings and characters were all right, and there were details everywhere to appreciate. From the slow reloading of black powder rifles to the flashes of old school cameras, everything was well executed. Social commentary to both the 1800s and the present has also generally been well handled. But with all the strength Damn as a period piece, it still fails as a horror film.
‘The Damned’ brings nothing new to the werewolf genre
The thought of someone turning into a man-eating monster uncontrollably is terrifying. Giant killer wolves are scary too. So it’s reasonable for a werewolf that combines two scary things to be scary as well. But werewolf movies have been around for over a century, and werewolf stories have been around for much longer. The passage of time and the exposure of our culture to keeping werewolves has weakened the fear that people once associated with beasts. There is no doubt that werewolves as a concept are still scary and the presence of one of them would be terrifying in reality. But in the modern moviegoer’s mind, these terrifying monsters are largely reduced to Scooby-Doo villains, toy dolls, and embarrassing teen romances. For a 2022 werewolf horror movie to succeed, it must overcome that stigma and offer viewers something unique and very scary. Damn did not provide this.
Before it turns into a monster movie Damn tries to be slow psychological horror that uses nightmares to explore the guilt, fear and paranoia of its characters. After the massacre of the gypsies, the townspeople begin to have nightmares about a corpse effigy and a set of silver wolf teeth buried under it. The first time one of the characters sees this nightmare, it is creepy and unsettling. The audience can feel the fear that the character feels. The problem is that the same nightmare scene is repeated almost the same way several times throughout the movie. The scarecrow appears in a foggy field, the character walks and looks frightened, plays the same cut-and-paste video of birds fluttering on the ground, and the teeth are dug out. It’s shown over and over again with very little that differentiates each scene’s appearance.
Why The Damned Failed As A Horror Movie
Much of the horror and dread in general is associated with facing something shocking, disturbing, unexpected, or unknown. Repetition works exactly the opposite of these factors. In most cases, the more you see something, the less scary it becomes. So when Damn shows the same nightmare scene several times, it completely kills the fear and becomes laughable. It was delightful of Ellis to try a slow and psychological take on a typical werewolf story. But for this to be effective, the audience needs to feel the fear and unpleasant emotions that the characters experience. When the audience laughs at the fact that they see the same dream for the fourth time, while others leave the theater out of boredom, the horror is clearly not working.
Another problem with DamnThe horror lies in the overuse of clichés. It seems like Ellis sat down and mulled over all those horror movie clichés and then pieced them together. Biblical curses, Native American (Gypsy) burial grounds, a mysterious but knowledgeable stranger, children turning into something evil, nudity, gory violence, monsters, etc. It has all been done before and better. Damn adds nothing of substance to the horror genre or the werewolf myth. Ellis attempted to make the story unique through slow pace, new monster designs, and some additions to traditional lore. Although, in essence, Damn it’s the same werewolf story that audiences have seen for decades. It does not cause fear and is filled with banal paths. Viewers will walk away from the film, remembering the scenes of historical brutality, and forget the tiresome nightmares and shamefully bald werewolves.
Source: Collider
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