Robert Minervini’s The Damned begins with two wolves tearing into a elk carcass, ripping off its fur and chewing its intestines. This isn’t a nature documentary, but such gruesome images set the harsh tone for a movie imagining what it might be like to follow a regiment of Union soldiers charting unmapped Western territories in 1862. The temperature is dropping, the terrain is uncompromising, the food supply is low, the nearby forest is full of lurking enemies, and there’s no civilization in sight. It is a daily fight for survival, for community, for meaning.
To pull off this journey through the abyss, Minervini enlisted a group of non-professional actors to document what it might have been like at the height of the Civil War in an untouched, desolate part of the country. Over the course of this slice of challenging life, veteran sergeants and youthful scouts engage in the daily monotony of upkeep and small talk, pitching tents, playing cards, keeping watch, and pushing horse-drawn wagons up muddy ridges. Notwithstanding a propulsive battle sequence, the movie is primarily concerned with the toll that an unclear mission takes on a ragtag team of beleaguered men, but it’s not quite enough drama to warrant such painstaking attempts at verisimilitude.
While The Damned sometimes resembles a reenactment, Minervini makes a valid attempt to highlight war’s aimless priorities on its marginalized and unheralded members. Throughout his career, the Italian director (who’s lived in the United States for more than two decades) has aimed to blur the boundaries between documentary and narrative (Stop Pounding the Heart, The Other Side, What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire?), capturing the forgotten and mundane aspects of life with non-professional actors whose ambiguity and lack of star power invite authenticity. He’s interested in the ways landscapes and conditions impact people, toggling between fiction and reality and using that tension to mine a deeper truth.
Sometimes that can be revelatory and immersive. Midway through The Damned, musket fire takes over the infantry’s encampment, forcing various soldiers to scatter. It’s impossible to see where the gunfire is coming from or who is doing the shooting. The faceless enemy only ramps up the tension. Minervini ratchets up the volume and captures the chaos through the perspective of a third-person shooter game, hovering behind individual men as they scramble to reload powder and shoot into treelines. It’s a technique that borrows from 1917, occupying the tunnel vision of a few scared members, one of whom attempts to camouflage himself by burrowing into a raised mound.
And then, eventually, the pops fade away, leaving only dead bodies and haunted expressions. There are no protagonists here, only faces Minervini is keen to return to and explore more than others. “You realize your family is more important than your country,” one of them professes, still coping with the ambush. Another explains why he entered the Union in the first place: “I needed a paycheck.” Their cause isn’t bound by some superior complex surrounding the fate of their nation––it’s mostly a personal one, a decision of practical importance that has landed them in the middle of nowhere and the crosshairs of an ambiguous opposition.
Minervini fills in the rest of this hyper-realist sojourn with snippets of conversations and activities––musket-training, gold-panning––that don’t amount to “scenes.” They form the foundation of a narrative that lacks forward progress as it lingers on its existential themes. Its best feature is in the shallow-focused lens of cinematographer (and score composer) Carlos Alfonso Corral, who plays with silhouettes against bonfires and finds the poetry of treacherous conditions, like fluffy snowflakes balancing delicately on a soldier’s nest-like beard. The details of his compositions suggest intent. In a bleak and dire situation (they’re “the damned” for a reason), all that’s left to appreciate is nature’s beauty.
The Damned screened at the 62nd New York Film Festival and will be released by Grasshopper Film.
The post NYFF Review: The Damned Flirts With Documentary and Reenactment in a Frigid Civil War Sojourn first appeared on The Film Stage.
