I'll Make This One Short and Sweet

Rating: 9/10 (8 October 2016)

As I write this review, there are currently 1103 user reviews of this movie on this site. 1103? That fact alone ought to tell you something, right? I mean 1103 people felt strongly enough about this film to go onto a website and write a review of it.
The reason is quite simple, this movie is a modern masterpiece of horror. It is chilling and truly frightening and far more intelligent than most horror films of this era. While there are a few cheesy jump scares at the beginning of the movie, they mostly serve as place setters. The movie is taking its' time, building up characters, introducing us to a diverse group of women who each have their own personalities and are far from cookie cutter roles. During this buildup we get a few moments of Hollywood jump scare. Once we enter the caves, though, the movie provides some terrifying tension. That first moment that one of the crawlers appears behind our heroines will make even the hardest horror fan jump a moment. Marshall keeps the tension ramped up to 11 throughout the movie expertly, slowly ratcheting up that action to a fever pitch.
As I mentioned, the women in this movie are not teenagers (thank god). They are not cardboard cutouts waiting for their moment of death. You get to know each woman and exactly the kind of person that she is, which is important for the dynamics of how the movie plays out. There is real internal tension here among the characters that works well and would have made for a good movie without any monsters, but the monsters are here. Oh yes.
These crawlers are excellently designed. In a genre full of retreads and repeats, it is hard to present something I've never seen before but Marshall managed to do that. They look scary as hell. They make the sort of noises you'll hear in your nightmares. They move with a quickness that is relentless, yet they are not unstoppable monstrosities either. They don't see so well. Every monster needs a weakness, or they become a cartoon cliché or just boring. It also provides our characters and, thus, us as the viewer with hope.
Many have an issue with the ending. Many people don't like to think for themselves either. It's bleak. It's ambiguous. Not everything needs to provide you with spoon-fed answers.