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A grand, poisonous melodrama about aristocratic decay and fascist opportunism, staged with Visconti’s operatic visual control. It’s provocative, lush, and deliberately excessive, which makes it unforgettable if you’re open to a cold, abrasive historical tragedy.
Where to watch: Buy
Thu · 2h 38m
Director: Luchino Visconti
Starring: Dirk Bogarde, Ingrid Thulin, Helmut Griem
In the early days of Nazi Germany, a powerful noble family must adjust to life under the new dictatorship regime.
Luchino Visconti
Dirk Bogarde, Ingrid Thulin, Helmut Griem
A grand, poisonous melodrama about aristocratic decay and fascist opportunism, staged with Visconti’s operatic visual control. It’s provocative, lush, and deliberately excessive, which makes it unforgettable if you’re open to a cold, abrasive historical tragedy.
Luchino Visconti turns the rise of Nazism into a chamber drama of wealth, appetite, and self-destruction. Rather than broad political explanation, the film watches a powerful family rot from the inside as ambition, lust, and fear make them easy prey for authoritarian power.
What makes it so striking is the collision between sumptuous period detail and moral ugliness. The film is elegant, but never comforting; its beauty feels contaminated by the corruption it depicts. That tension gives it a feverish, almost unbearable charge.
It won’t work for everyone. The performances are heightened, the plotting is baroque, and the film pushes decadence to a punishing extreme. But if you respond to Visconti’s tragic grandeur, this is one of his most savage and memorable works.
Jerry (5★) · 250 likes
This is just Succession (2018) Nazi Edition, and Helmut Berger’s character is definitely Roman.
nick (4★) · 238 likes
The Damned is crazy, disturbing and heart-wrenching. As a grim insight into the 1930s Germany where nazis had just took over power, Luchino Visconti opted for a microscopic approach, reflecting the madness of the German society as a whole, through the entry point of a high class German family, where family members are vying for power and control even at the cost of each other's life, and the end result is one of the most devastating and memorable accounts of
theriverjordan (4★) · 235 likes
Less than a century after Italian unification, national democracy had already begun to rot. Luchino Visconti’s “The Damned” depicts the sagging structure of a society with an extravagant facade, built around a frame than could never sustain its weight of its own decadence. “The Damned” is a thinly veiled allegory about a true life German industrial family that supplied the Nazis with steel in order to retain and grow their social standing. Which - was never questionable at the outset.… more
Sean Baker · 177 likes
Saw that this is happening -- www.filmlinc.org/daily/visconti-retrospective-announced/ -- A Visconti retrospective at Lincoln Center. I won't be in NYC so decided to finally settle and watch this on DVD. Didn't have nearly the effect that Rocco and His Brothers or The Leopard had on me but it's still Visconti and still a must-watch. Visconti's over stylization is nice to look at but never allowed me to fully enter the world.
Richard Chandler (3.5★) · 125 likes
"Today in Germany anything can happen." I must confess to feeling slightly underwhelmed by Luchino Visconti's The Damned (known as Götterdämmerung throughout Europe), though the film definitely has much to recommend it. Two obvious factors stand out when trying to pinpoint the nature of my relative disappointment: 1) my preexistent relationship with Visconti (having seen Rocco and His Brothers, Le Notti Bianche, The Leopard and Death in Venice) has been a thoroughly positive one and 2) Rainer Werner Fassbinder cited The… more
Visconti’s other great study of old power yielding to a new order, with the same sense of grandeur, decline, and historical fatalism.
Another Visconti melodrama where private desire and national upheaval collide in lush, tragic style.
For viewers drawn to Visconti’s formal beauty, repression, and the slow collapse of a refined world.
A family saga of ambition, fracture, and emotional violence, though more humane than this film.
A visually exquisite portrait of fascist-era moral surrender and psychological self-erasure.
Captures the seduction and rot of prewar Germany through performance, decadence, and political dread.
Not thematically similar in setting, but it shares the pleasure of watching power, ego, and institution collide in a tightly controlled drama.
For its transgressive, unsettling mix of erotic obsession, trauma, and fascist afterlife imagery.
If what interests you most is the extremity of power, corruption, and bodily degradation under fascism.
A sweeping account of an elite world being absorbed and erased by political transformation.
For the cold elegance, historical fatalism, and sense of observing a ruling class slide toward ruin.
Not a real recommendation entry; skip.
fascism and complicity, aristocratic decay, family power struggle, moral corruption, sexual decadence, industrial capitalism, political opportunism, authoritarianism
historical drama, political corruption, aristocracy, fascism, decadence, melodrama, European art cinema, moral decay, family saga, 1930s