Metacritic reviews

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.

If it were possible to send a camera crew back into the past to capture such an event, the result would be something close to what Minervini delivers in this quietly intoxicating and existentially real war movie.

It’s a film about tableaus and texture that strives, largely successfully, to re-create the experience of being an extremely small part of a vast, historic conflagration. In effect, it’s an anti-spaghetti western, eschewing all things grandiose and bold-faced in favor of the small and prosaic.

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.

The Damned has a tendency to meander, but in so doing, it strives toward something authentic.

Roberto Minervini’s camera ably conjures the melancholy and alienation that afflict his characters across scenes that merge documentary and neorealist techniques, but it’s far from realistic to expect a troop of soldiers to act aloof around each other when they’re all in the shit.

At times the film feels almost subversive in its resolute lack of dramatic tension. And yet, as a melancholy mood piece, there’s a haunting quality to this handsomely filmed account of the slow attrition of faith, hope and purpose.

Tellingly, The Damned only threatens to become anything more than a ponderous — if immaculately convincing — Civil War reenactment when Minervini allows his characters to articulate their fading dreams of salvation in the clearest possible terms.

While The Damned sometimes resembles a reenactment, Minervini makes a valid attempt to highlight war’s aimless priorities on its marginalized and unheralded members.