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Los Angeles Times
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘The Damned' brings the Civil War to intimate life, obliquely and mesmerizingly
How much can you strip away from the war film and still have a war film? That question invigorates 'The Damned,' the new movie from Roberto Minervini, an Italian-born director who has spent the last 25 years living in America, our worrying cultural undercurrents seeping into his portraits of the marginalized and the discontent, usually documentaries. 'The Damned' represents his first foray into more traditional narrative storytelling, yet this existential drama bears all the hallmarks of his earlier work, less concerned with incident than conjuring a sense of place, time and, most important, a state of being. In his latest, Minervini brings viewers into the thick of the Civil War, only to find the same dazed souls and gnawing uncertainties that have always been his focus. It's a war film with very little combat, but it's about a war that still rages today. Minervini's naturalistic, observational style is on display from the film's first scene, which lingers on a pack of wolves meticulously digging into an animal carcass. 'The Damned' stays on the images just long enough for them to grow discomforting — when will Minervini cut away? — before introducing us to his anonymous protagonists, a collection of volunteer soldiers in the U.S. Army who have been sent out west in the winter of 1862. The specifics of the mission are as mysterious as these men's names as we watch them carry out the minutiae of military busywork. They set up tents. They play cards. They do target practice. Are they meant to represent the hungry wolves from the movie's opening? Or are they the prey? To call 'The Damned' an antiwar film would be to assign an arbitrary value to what is really a series of offhand episodes consisting of only modest activity. In Minervini's recent stellar nonfiction projects 'The Other Side' and 'What You Gonna Do When the World's on Fire?,' the director collaborated with his subjects to create unvarnished glimpses of everyday lives, sometimes working from prearranged scenarios. Although Minervini is credited as 'The Damned's' screenwriter, his new film draws from a similarly close relationship with his cast, the actors drawing on aspects of their real lives to inform their roles, scenes developing from a loosely sketched-out plot. In such an intimate, pensive atmosphere, characters emerge gradually out of the rugged landscape like windswept trees or weathered stones. The man identified in the end credits as the Sergeant (Tim Carlson, one of the subjects of Minervini's 2013 documentary 'Stop the Pounding Heart') is ostensibly the leader, but as the untamed Montana wilderness goes from barren to snowy over an unspecified period of time, the more apparent it becomes that no commanding officer is necessary. The skeletal score by Carlos Alfonso Corral, who doubles as the film's cinematographer, hints at an elemental menace just over the horizon. But real danger rarely occurs. Instead, these men are trapped in their own heads, their tender, confessional musings about God, war and manhood so rudimentary that they never aspire to the heights of folksy poetry. These soldiers are nothing special — as unimportant as their assignment. Because Minervini avoids the tropes of the antiwar film — no big speeches, no ponderous metaphors — it's almost a shock that he allows for one convention, an actual battle scene, which occurs about halfway through the 88-minute runtime. But even here, 'The Damned' refuses to follow formula, resulting in an intentionally haphazard sequence as the soldiers are ambushed, the characters fleeing and shooting in every direction, the camera trailing behind them, desperate to keep them in frame. Whether it's enemy forces or some random buffalo, the movie's shallow depth of focus ensures that we only see our troops. Everything else resides in a permanently fuzzy, unsettled background, a constant middle distance that traps the characters in their spiritual purgatory. There are limitations to Minervini's spartan approach. Whereas his documentary films crackle thanks to his unpredictable interactions with his subjects, 'The Damned' cannot help but feel slightly overdetermined, the outcomes predestined rather than organically unearthed. And yet, the concerns he brought to those earlier movies ripple here as well. 'The Other Side,' his somber 2015 study of racist drug addicts and gun-toting militia members in rural Louisiana, remains the definitive warning of our modern MAGA age, while 2018's 'What You Gonna Do' prefigures the Black Lives Matter movement. Now, for the first time, this prescient filmmaker visits America's distant past, subtly pinpointing the economic inequalities, senseless brutality and thwarted masculinity that will bedevil the nation for the next 160 years. The Civil War is long over, but the country's divisions remain, those core tensions naggingly unresolved. Don't think of 'The Damned' as an antiwar film — consider it an origin story for Minervini's perceptive, understated exploration of an America still in conflict.
Wall Street Journal
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘The Damned' Review: Stasis in the Civil War
War is boring as hell in 'The Damned,' an austere western drama set far from the battlefields on the 1862 frontier. It seeks not to tell a story but to capture a set of feelings. None of them are pleasant. Beginning with a less-than-subtle image of wolves tearing apart a carcass, Italian writer-director Roberto Minervini all but announces his intent to add an entry to the already voluminous antiwar cinema. Evocatively naturalistic, his film painstakingly captures the largely uneventful existence of a small troop of Union Army volunteers somewhere out in the borderlands of the West. We don't learn the name of the state or territory where the film takes place, just as we are not told the names of any of the men. Instead, we observe their daily rituals—drinking bad coffee, playing ball games, standing guard around the perimeter. Among their most vital activities is peering at a ridge to see if any minute detail ever changes, which might as well be a metaphor for this type of film.
New York Times
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘The Damned' Review: Unfortunate Sons
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.
