“The Damned” is a thriller built on one of the oldest formulas in fiction. First, there are many, as Dame Agatha taught us, “And Then There were None.”

Ah, but what a setting this 19th century fable has — the treeless, snowy wastes of Iceland.

Thodur Palsson’s debut feature is a horror parable with supernatural overtones set in one of the most forbidding, under-inhabited landscapes on Earth.

The unnamed “fishing station” is somewhere in the uninhabited “north” — Iceland, we decide. Or Spitsbergen. But Norway makes more sense.

There, a handful of men (Joe Cole, Turlough Convery, Mícheál Óg Lane, Lewis Gibben, Francis McGee, and Rory McCann) fish out of a rowing dory all day, and gather in their communal shack to eat, drink and sing all night.

But Eva, played by Odessa Young of “Assassination Nation” and TV’s most recent version of “The Stand”) can do the drying racks math. They haven’t got enough fish left to feed themselves, much less take “home” for cash. She inherited this “station” from her late husband and it’s all she can do to not offend the masculinity of helmsman Ragnar (McCann) and take charge of their situation.

Things are dire enough before the day when they spy a sailing barkentine foundering on the distant “teeth” (reef) off the coast. Ragnar’s too quick with “It’s none’a our concern” judgement, which doesn’t silence the others, who see fellow seamen in peril.

But Eva seconds Ragnar. They haven’t the food to feed themselves. Any “rescue” would put their lives in danger, and she is responsible for those lives. “We won’t fish today, out of respect,” is her version of “thoughts and prayers.”

Events still conspire to send the fishermen out to that wreck, hunting for salvage when they’re sure those who survived the sinking have perished. They haven’t.

And as bodies wash ashore and they make coffins and bury them, the superstitious cook, Helga (Siobhan Finneran) warns them. Tie their legs, drive nails through their feet or the dead will come back to haunt those who didn’t save them.

The “Draugr” will be among them, an avenging shape-shifter, we gather.

“There ain’t no life left in’em. Just hate.”

As things go wrong and their ranks are thinned by a string of sad and horrible deaths, Eva tries to rationally confront their dilemma and find a way to save them, while there are those left to save.

Because the Draugr is both a direct menace, and an indirect one. It’d love “to see us turn on each other.”

The landscape is really the star here, but Young, McCann, Cole (playing the fisherman Eva trusts, who is sweet on his late boss’s widow), Convery (as the jovial Hákon) make strong impressions, and everybody cast seems chillingly at home in this forbidding place doing that deadly, lonesome work.

Palsson uses inventive hallucinations and heartrending pathos about the grim calculus of survival weighed against doing the right thing — using the code of the sea and simple Christian charity rather than self-preservation to guide your actions — to break up the blasts of terror and violence.

The picture’s predictable formula encounters an ending that will turn off many, a sort of cop-out in “Let’s EXPLAIN all that came before” sense.

But there’s no ignoring that “The Damned” has a visual, visceral power that should stick in the memory long past the point of “And Then There Were None.”

Rating: R, bloody violence, suicide, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Odessa Young, Joe Cole, Siobhan Finneran, Turlough Convery, Mícheál Óg Lane, Lewis Gibben, Francis McGee, and Rory McCann

Credits: Directed by Thodur Palsson, scripted by Jamie Hannigan. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:29