The skies are overcast and the tone is contemplative in “The Damned,” as a small company of Union Army soldiers sets out in 1862 to explore the dangerously unmapped territories of the American West.
What emerges, though, is more akin to a mood poem than a war movie. In keeping with the socially conscious sensibilities of its director, the Italian-born Roberto Minervini (whose previous work has sometimes probed the forgotten souls of rural Texas and urban Louisiana), “The Damned” is shaped as a wistful and laconic study of the minutiae of survival. Though billed as his first fiction film, it wobbles tantalizingly on a permeable line between narrative and documentary. Unscripted events and largely unnamed characters emerge organically from the director’s offscreen prompts and the men’s immersion in the life of the camp where much of the movie takes place.
This means that, for long stretches, we’re watching the soldiers pitch tents, play cards, do laundry and complain about the deepening winter and declining rations. Embedded alongside the men, we eavesdrop on conversations that range from instructive to confessional, hopeful to cautiously philosophical. They have come from all over, with beliefs as varied as their reasons for enlisting. A golden-haired 16-year-old admits to having shot only rabbits and squirrels before following his father and older brother into the Army. When the three pray together, secure in their faith that the only happiness lies in the afterlife, his innocence is heartbreaking.
If God is here at all, he’s in the details: the pot of coffee bubbling on a laboriously built fire; the dusting of snow on a pitch-black beard; the veins of gold in a lump of quartz.
“This land has it all,” one man marvels, seeing beyond the conflict to the promise of the soil and the wildlife around them. At times, these moments are acutely lyrical, as when we watch a soldier lovingly clean his horse’s head (of mud or blood, we don’t know), then press his forehead against the animal in silent communion.
Politics is almost entirely absent, along with its accompanying animosities. When a Virginian, who joined up in defiance of his slave-owning neighbors, quietly announces that “putting people in chains is wrong,” there is no argument from those comrades who are simply there for the paycheck. By contrast, the ease of the film’s early rhythms and the intimacy of Carlos Alfonso Corral’s images have an almost lulling effect, the sense of tranquillity so strong that when the shooting starts, the shock is real.
For a time, all is chaos, the men frantically running, apparently without direction or strategy. Are they heading toward or away from the invisible shooters? We assume they’re being ambushed by Confederate snipers, or perhaps even the silent cowboys who circled them one day, but the director doesn’t clarify. Pointlessness is his point, as is terror, exemplified by the trembling soldier who desperately hunkers his body against a hillock, the competence and confidence he displayed in earlier scenes already melted away.
Shot in Montana in 2022, using mainly nonprofessional actors (including local firefighters and members of the National Guard), “The Damned” relies on improvised dialogue and a resolute refusal to manufacture tension or good guy-bad guy distinctions. The style is impressionistic and minimalist: Sometimes the only illumination is a flaming torch, the only color Union blue, the only soundtrack the howling of wolves. Cold and hunger and a general aimlessness give the men — and us — time to reflect on the horror of a mission that requires them to kill their fellow countrymen. And when one man remarks that many of his beliefs had later turned out to be false, even the family of Baptists has no answer.
In the movie’s final section, a hushed mournfulness prevails as the dead are buried and the company searches for a route through the mountains. Minervini, who moved to New York just months before the Sept. 11 attacks, isn’t interested in lecturing us on pacifism. Yet as we once again experience a painfully divided nation, we’re also occupying a cinematic space between the past of “The Damned” and the near-future schism of Alex Garland’s “Civil War” (2024). In that space, we can clearly see how far we have come and how little we have learned.
The Damned
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters.
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