Spoilers ahead for The Damned
The Damned is a chilling new horror movie and psychological thriller now playing in theaters starring Odessa Young and Joe Cole. Set in 19th-century Iceland, the movie follows a widow after she inherits her late husband's fishing station.
The crew are in charge of daily fishing for themselves and to sell later, but due to the harsh climate and their isolated location, they have to contend with resource scarcity. So when they see a ship sink off the shore, the crew must decide whether to take a boat out to sea and assist the drowning men or leave them to their watery demise. Their decision shapes the rest of the movie.
For the most part, The Damned plays out like a typical haunting story in that Eva and the men slowly start to think they're being haunted by a draugr, a legendary creature from Norse folklore that essentially equates to a spirit or the living undead. But the film also toys with the idea that the characters are simply going mad due to their guilt and the desperate circumstances.
Eva's climactic realization
After almost everyone has been killed, Eva finally confronts the draugr who has been stalking her for the entire film. She shoots it with Magnus' shotgun and then dumps oil all over its body and the cabin as a whole. Lighting the entire thing on fire, just as Helen suggested.
Stumbling back outside, Eva stands alongside the remaining survivors. She looks back at the burning building and recalls a different version of events. Instead of a scary draugr, Eva now sees the final events of the film as her facing off against a human shipwreck survivor. In this version, Eva murders this man by shooting him and then burning him alive. He claims he stole the food as revenge for them letting his men die without any assistance. The man also shows Eva his watch, the same one that Aron had pulled out of a corpse's pocket at the beginning of the movie.
This leads to multiple interpretations because now we have to question whether there ever really was a draugr at all, or if the crew just drove themselves to insanity because of a combination of old wives' tales, folklore scares, and extreme guilt due to their actions. We have no way of knowing for certain that there was something supernatural occurring. Maybe there was an illness going around or the men went stir-crazy from paranoia and starvation.
We know that the food was stolen, which doesn't really seem indicative of a supernatural being. Remember, we did see that one of the coffins was empty, indicating that something climbed out or that maybe one of the men they buried wasn't really dead after all, likely the same one that had the watch Aron handled earlier.
The Damned leaves us with an ambiguous ending, and it's left up to viewer interpretation to decide what they believe. Given the horror on Eva's face and the film's various hints regarding superstitions and storytelling, I'm inclined to think this really was a paranoid story that ultimately saw all of these people die because they didn't help the men on the sinking ship and drove themselves insane afterward with guilt, helped along by the sole survivor seeking vengeance.