@Courtesy of Cinetic Media

Six years after What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? the Italian director Roberto Minervini is back behind the camera with a feature film set during the American Civil War. In 1862, a battalion of volunteers from the Union Army was sent to the uncharted lands of the West to explore the territory. The uncertainty of unknown landscapes, the horror of the war, and the danger of a cold winter will test the soldiers to the extreme consequences. 

In the same way, it happened in his previous works, Minervini’s first goal is to show the poetry, the elegy of truth behind the events narrated in The Damned. Even if this time he is working on a fictional story, with a screenplay he wrote himself based on an idea by the protagonist Jeremiah Knupp, the director uses the camera to grab as much as possible the realism of the settings and his actors’ faces. By doing this, he is trying at the same time to go over that factual reality and reach something behind it, showing how beauty and pain can live together in one person’s heart and soul.

In more than one moment The Damned doesn’t advance in the plot, on the contrary, it just seems to stop in order to observe the wilderness surrounding the young soldiers. The atmosphere and the images created by the cinematographer Carlos Alfonso Corral are precious, especially during the battle sequence shot at the sunset. That is by far the most powerful and visually stunning moment of Minervini’s movie, when violence and death suddenly arrive upon the soldiers but no enemy is shown because there is no need to actually put a body or a face to a threat that is already all around the characters.

These soldiers are in fact damned because they chose to push themselves where no one had ever been before, daring to challenge the laws of nature and maybe even of men they have never met. The true, mortal enemy in Minervini’s movie is within, is the desperation of those who can’t comprehend a war because there is nothing to understand other than blood and death. Maybe they tried to escape the conflict fleeing into the wilderness, but the violence perpetrated by men is impossible to elude, at least in the world depicted by the director. 

The Damned is a movie that owns its internal coherence, that develops clearly its author’s idea, and still unfortunately isn’t effective as it should have been. The issue isn’t perhaps the movie itself but the fact that many directors in the past used a similar approach to what The Damned shows, achieving a way stronger result. Everything Minervini tries to convey, we have already experienced in one way or another through other iconic films like Jeremiah Johnson by Sydney Pollack, The New World by Terrence Malick, or even some independent westerns by Monte Hellmann.

Since Minervini developed his style with clarity in his previous works as much as in The Damned, we are sure this is his artistic voice, but he just applied it to such an iconic genre that has been declined in so many different ways that it’s just very difficult to find a new take on it. The Damned simple doesn’t succeed in it. No matter how beautiful the images are or how moving the soundtrack is, you always have the unsettling feeling that you already saw it somewhere else before. 

Winner of the Best Director prize at the Certain Regard section at the last Cannes Film Festival, The Damned achieves what Roberto Minervini had in mind approaching a difficult genre like western during the Civil War years but fails to propose something truly original to the audience. If you are not too familiar with the western, maybe you will find The Damned quite interesting. If you are, you most likely already know how this movie is and what it talks about…

RATE: C

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