The Damned (Roberto Minervini, 2024)

The Damned is purportedly a fiction film with a screenplay written by Minervini. But his m.o. has always been to blend fiction with documentary and it's unclear how much of the dialogue was improvised or how much was influenced by Minervini's discussions with his actors (or entirely the product of Minervini's imagination). Despite a mostly stationary camera, The Damned feels more like a direct cinema documentary than a hermetically sealed diegetic world. In the Winter of 1862, a group of volunteer soldiers are sent to the western territories (specifically, Montana where it was filmed) and, with the Civil War raging back east, they wonder about the purpose of their mission. The film is comprised of disconnected scenes of the men grappling with their day-to-day existence as soldiers - discussing why they joined the army, learning how to scan the landscape for dangers, helping one another with various wounds, trying to find a balance between idealism and cynicism (and perhaps even nihilism), etc. Minervini treats the Civil War with a parallax view at best. As he notes in the press kit, "I wanted to shed the weight of history a little bit to facilitate this experiential journey, to allow for something more cathartic and more primordial to come from within and from these individuals." He achieves this goal as The Damned sweeps you up in the flow of these men trying to find meaning in their work as they try to stay alive. But so far, Roberto Minervini has yet to fulfill the promise of his expansive Louisiana/The Other Side (2015), one of the finest films of the century. Hypnotic as much of The Damned is, it feels slight compared to Louisiana, so rigidly focused that you long for the weight of some other force to bear down on the project, if only to ensure you will recall the film a year from now. 

Grade: A-minus