Odessa Young and Joe Cole Are Stuck In a Wintry Purgatory in The Damned Trailer [Exclusive]

With the winds of winter on the way (no, like the actual season not the book), there’s never been a better time for a chilly, dark, cold, and damp thriller to promise a scary good time for viewers. Today, Collider is thrilled to share the exclusive first look at Thordur Palsson’s (The Valhalla Murders) feature-length directorial debut, The Damned. Starring the likes of The Daughter’s Odessa Young and Peaky Blinders’s Joe Cole, the movie will transport audiences back to the 19th-century when a woman is faced with an impossible decision to either save lives or spare those of the ones she loves. Set for a release through Vertical Entertainment, audiences can expect to see The Damned when it strikes land in cinemas on January 3, 2025.

Really driving the bleakness and desperation of a winter home, The Damned centers on Eva (Young), a widowed woman who works her days away as a member of a fishing village. Barely scraping by with enough to keep her and her loved ones fed, life gets all the harder for Eva and her neighbors when a ship sinks into the icy waters just offshore. The villagers are faced with an incredibly harsh moral dilemma - risk their lives to save those who are stranded in the water or simply turn their backs on the shipwrecked crew barely holding onto life. And, should they choose the latter, will this decision damn them to the chilly darkness for good?

Filling out the ensemble cast of The Damned is a lineup that includes Siobhan Finneran (Coronation Street), Rory McCann (Game of Thrones), Turlough Convery (Saint Maud), Lewis Gribben (Somewhere Boy), Francis Magee (Black Mirror), and Mícheál Óg Lane (The Survivalist). The horror film is the latest to come from Palsson, who also penned the original story, with Jamie Hannigan writing the screenplay. Along with his work on the TV series The Valhalla Murders, Palsson has also been the eye behind such shorts as Brothers and Goodbye Heart.

Critics Are Already Digging ‘The Damned’

After celebrating its grand debut at the Cannes Film Festival, The Damned has been drumming up plenty of excitement from critics, including Collider’s Chase Hutchinson who caught the film during a screening at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year. With plenty of kind words for Palsson’s grandiose feature-length debut, Hutchinson had plenty to spare for cinematographer, Eli Arenson, whose handiwork set the overall empty tone of the film, writing,

“[Arenson] captures the beauty of this world just as he does the looming brutality . You gasp in awe at the vast landscapes, which are as magnificent to see as they are terrifying, just as your throat freezes up over the fear that there may be no getting free once it has you in its icy grasp. It is an experience where the darkness of the mind can swallow you just as completely as that of the world around you. When you least expect it, everything and anything you know can be ripped away from you.”

Check out Collider’s exclusive first look at the trailer for The Damned above and see it in cinemas on January 3, 2025.