Something about a wintry Icelandic landscape makes you feel as if you’ve slipped into another dimension — snow so white it’s almost blue, craggy peaks, frigid black water. “We should not be here,” Eva (Odessa Young) says at the start of “The Damned,” and you can see why. This is a landscape so large and prehistoric that humans seem like intruders. Sooner or later, the land will rid itself of them.

Eva and her husband owned a fishing outpost on this remote 19th- century Icelandic coast. But her husband has died, and Eva, still a young woman, is now running it alone. So she cooks and monitors and manages the operations, including a group of rough-hewed but kindly men who fish with her boats. Her closest friend is Daniel (Joe Cole), but she is still for the most part alone. This winter, though, has been brutal — the weather is excruciating, and everyone is worried about making it to spring. There are not even enough provisions to get them through; they’ve taken to eating the bait.

One day, while readying the boat for another day of work, Eva and the men spot in the distance a large sailing ship that is sinking, nose-first, into the icy water. They stare, horrified. There are people on that boat, and those people will die without help. Eva must make an impossible decision: Do they rescue the men, whom they cannot feed, and thus risk their own starvation? Or do they let them sink so they may make it to spring?

This is the simple moral dilemma that kicks off “The Damned,” directed by Thordur Palsson (who also wrote the story for Jamie Hannigan’s screenplay). Such a title makes you ask questions: Who are the damned ones here, and who is doing the damning? The movie gives us options for answers. Certainly the outpost itself seems damned by the terrain and the weather, the buildings battered and barely holding together. The men on the boat are damned twice over — once by a God who allows their ship to run afoul of the landscape, and once by the fishermen and Eva, watching from shore.

But the fishermen and Eva seem to damn themselves, and the rest of the movie concerns what it really means to be condemned. This is a horror film, and for the most part a primally efficient one. Daylight is so bright that the colors feel washed out, and creepy sights — which include eels tangled with the intestines that spill out of a corpse — are more shocking and bleak without shadows to hide them.

Yet it’s when the sun goes down that the mind ranges toward more ominous apparitions. The darkness is thick and chilly, wrapping all of the people in inky blackness except when they’re near a fire. That’s frightening enough — the threat of conflagration is ever-present — but it also means they can only spot movement in the corners through flickers of light. They, and we, start to wonder what we’re seeing.

Because, yes, things start going bump in the night. There’s a kind of Gothic quality to the apparitions, calling to mind Edward Gorey figures, but all smeared and melted and smudged. What we’re seeing, mostly from Eva’s point of view, isn’t clear, and that uncertainty is far more frightening — the devil you don’t know, so to speak.

That’s why Helga, the older woman who works with Eva at the outpost, is convinced they’re being haunted by Draugurs, sort of revenge-seeking zombies whispered about in folklore. She pleads with them to perform pagan rituals and create charms to keep the Draugurs away. Some of the men, scorning old wives’ tales, prefer to pacify God and ask him for protection from the elements. The solution is not at all clear.

Given that everyone is essentially trapped in what feels like unending cycles of light and dark, nowhere to go, nothing to save them, it’s not surprising that “The Damned” becomes repetitive around the middle. Its tension weakens, and tediousness sets in, though that effectively evokes what the characters are experiencing. But a period of slog reduces the story’s immersive quality, slowing momentum.

What’s best about the movie, though, is how it eventually picks back up and morphs into something a bit different from straight-ahead horror. Eva’s life has taken a turn she never expected, and yet it seems almost inevitable for a woman carrying so much grief and loss and loneliness. “The Damned” suggests a landscape without pity or compassion for any living inhabitants; “this is a godless place,” someone notes, a world in which nobody cares if these characters live or die, or something else altogether. At best they have one another. At worst they have only themselves.