possibly the most effective and scary horror movie of the year

Rating: 10/10 (5 August 2006)

Neil Marshall is not a name I was familiar with before seeing his latest film, The Descent; he's made movies released in the UK, which got limited to no release in the US, to which it would be rightful to say that this is the best kind of calling card he could have made. It's a horror movie that's made with the eye of a professional, one who realizes that the best way to get an audience involved in what comes in the second to third acts of the picture is to make an equally compelling set-up act with the characters. The cast is also all but unknown to me, but they all too perform very strongly as the tough, hot women who decide to risk it down in a spelunking (if that's the word) expedition. Particularly the roles of Sarah (Shauna MacDonald) and Juno (Natalie Jackson Mendoza) are very compelling once the action really starts to roll.
But going back to the professional part of the style- this is the kind of horror movie where you do and you don't notice what the filmmakers are doing. Unlike a recent horror movie like Saw which induces lots of fancy shmancy photography and editing to try to draw a viewer in, the director knows the best way is to not show what's going on. With this case being a cave, where the claustrophobia, consistently dark corners, and the lack of direction and light, marks enough doom that it just needs to be shot in a straightforward telling-the-story manner. At the same time, even with all of this atmosphere induced once the creatures appear and the pace picks up tenfold, you almost might forget really that a 'style' is going on, which is quite pleasing at a time when horror directors feel the need to make things gritty just for the sake of it. This is not to say the film isn't one of the most gory of the year, with enough blood to probably go through two of these newer remakes.
The set-up to the film with the girls is quite good (including a beginning involving a certain child that is one of the great modern horror movie beginnings by being realistically horrific), leading one to want to see these girls make it through to the end. The ending that has been apparently changed by Lions Gate for the US release is indeed unsatisfying, though it's lead-up is a plot element that's the only convention that doesn't really work. This is that a particular character near death gives information that's only there so that later in the film something else can come of this, breaking part of the belief within the disbelief (if that makes sense). But, overall, this is likely to become a nifty cult hit from overseas, the best of its kind to come from the UK since 28 Days Later. It doesn't really lie to you about what it is, and within certain conventions everything is put to top notch use with locations, tension, special effects and make-up, and even a couple of amusing points. It's a piece that I would probably in good conscience recommend to any serious fan of the genre.