‘The Damned’ Delivers A Surprisingly Haunting Meditation On Faith And War
Warning: This review contains spoilers.
(REVIEW) There’s something dehumanizing about modern war movies that puzzles me. It’s not that war itself is dehumanizing — that’s hardly news. What’s striking is how recent war films — from “Dunkirk” to “All Quiet on the Western Front” to “Warfare” — tend to create emotional distance between the audience and the protagonists.
In such films, we barely get to know the characters, making it hard to connect with them on a human level. The movie “1917,” for instance, kills off one of its two main characters far too early, leaving the rest of the film feeling more like a video game than a narrative experience.
“The Damned” is a different kind of war movie. In fact, it may be one of the most human war films I’ve seen in a long time — and one that also engages directly with questions of faith. Set during the Civil War, the film follows a company of soldiers dispatched by the U.S. Army to patrol the uncharted Western territories. As their mission begins to shift, the purpose of their engagement gradually slips away, leaving them — and us — searching for meaning.
Roberto Minervini, an Italian-born director who lives and works in the U.S., is widely recognized as one of the foremost auteurs of narrative documentaries, blending dramatized storytelling with observational realism. “The Damned” earned him the Best Director award in the “Un Certain Regard” section at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival — and it’s easy to see why.
The movie was made in a highly unconventional way. As reported by Film Comment: “Minervini gathered a group of nonprofessional actors (some colleagues and carryovers from past projects, others brought in through open-door casting); set them up with costuming and props on location in Montana; and then captured their improvised interactions within a broad narrative framework.”
While this seems like it wouldn’t work very well, the result is actually quite striking — and one of my favorite war films that I’ve seen in a long time.
The film largely follows this group of soldiers in their isolation in the American West as they try to survive and stake out a world for their country. It’s hauntingly and beautifully shot in a quiet, ponderous way that people will most easily compare to Terrence Malick films. Characters talk together or walk through breathtaking, wide-open spaces, or sit together while the camera focuses on their faces or the details of what they’re doing or making.
The film cuts between different moments, often missing the beginning and the end of a conversation, so you feel like you’re getting a collage of days, weeks and hours where these people are just living their lives. This makes the violence that does happen feel truly alarming and horrifying.
Despite this, the film makes sure you get to know the characters well enough — what they want, why they do what they do and what they believe — that you get to know them and care about them. This makes you truly feel like you’re there with them in their loneliness and their existential questioning. This is something many war films — like "Dunkirk" and "Warfare” — don’t do nearly as well. These films tried to make us feel like we were connected to the soldiers without us knowing who they were or what drove them. “The Damned” shows just how effective a meditation on war can be if you let the characters tell us why they’re there.
This was very intentional on Minervini’s part. He wanted the movie to be about the individuals and for the actors to be part of shaping those characters, giving them their voice and getting to express that voice. As he said in the Film Comment interview: “How they were going to embark on this experience individually, what they were going to bring to it, how they felt around the political discourse versus the spiritual, and how scary or painful it was to reflect upon the state of America today or America before. It’s cathartic, and also traumatic at times. It makes them feel vulnerable: how physical the experience is, how heavy history weighs on them. Even wearing a U.S. Army uniform — yes, it’s a costume, but there are also military codes. In the end, I knew that if I wanted to tell a story about war, I wanted to avoid talking about a shapeless mass of humanity. There’s no counting of nameless bodies. It’s about this journey that is done alone.”
Faith is discussed explicitly here, which is quite surprising given how much the actors were directing the conversation. One of the youngest soldiers has a deep belief in God and the Bible and the others openly affirm his faith, though few of them share it. One of them is openly pacifist because that’s what he believes the Bible teaches, but it feels wrong to him to let other people fight to overcome slavery’s evil. Another wishes he had faith, but he’s seen too much and has seen too many of his beliefs turn out to be wrong. Another doesn’t see how anything about God has anything to do with war, where the only thing to do is survive.
What’s so refreshing about this is that faith is such a normal part of people’s lives and conversations, but is so rarely portrayed as such in the mainstream media and across our popular culture. It’s so refreshing to have a movie — set in the 1860s no less put made today — that acknowledges it as such. It adds to the feeling of authenticity and depth of the discussions that can be had.
What’s amazing here is how all of this is discussed without the audience being forced to take a side. All the characters’ beliefs are treated with respect, and they are allowed to say their piece, but in the end, the film doesn’t tell us which of these is right or wrong. But that doesn’t mean that the film doesn’t have something to say. The film overwhelmingly makes you feel like war is Hell and those who participate in it (for whatever reason) are damned, metaphorically if not literally. But it does this without emptying the characters of their voice. Both the characters' voices and the filmmaker’s voice are intact. More storytellers — religious and otherwise — could learn from this.
The main flaw of this film is the ending, although not everyone will see it as one. After the soldiers all, in their own ways, face death, the final holdouts find themselves lost in the snow, contemplating their fate. Then the movie just ends. I understand what the movie is going for. The anti-climatic climax is intentional. It is trying to leave the film ambiguous to give the experience of how war often doesn’t feel meaningful and leave room for the audience to find the meaning, if there is any.
But one of the biggest strengths of the film is how it achieved that balance of giving room for us to connect with the meaning-making the characters were doing without being forced to buy into any of their interpretations. Pulling back to such pure ambiguity removes us from the meaning-making that the characters are doing and therefore gives us less intentionality to wrestle with. The result is less, not more. Not an anti-cathartic whimper, but nothing.
War is hell, but humans do war, which means that we tell ourselves stories about why we do it. Few films can portray the dehumanizing quality of war while making the humanity — and faith — of its characters so dignified. That makes the ones who do worthy of our attention and gratitude.
Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.world, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at josephholmesstudios.com.