A Genre Exercise that Pushes All the Right Buttons

Rating: 9/10 (7 August 2006)

The Descent tells the story of six sporty women in their mid-twenties who venture into the Appalachian Mountains for a pleasant day of spelunking and catching up on old times. We meet the women a day before they set off for the cave: Juno, the alpha-female jock of the group, Holly, the rock climber punk, Beth, the smart one, Rebecca and Sam, the two sisters, and Sarah, who has become the quiet one since a car accident took the lives of her husband and young daughter a year earlier. The women spend a night drinking and reminiscing, and the next morning they hike to the mouth of a nearby cave system in the woods and repel into it. They run into trouble when they find out that they have descended into an unexplored cave, and that their only known way back out of the cave has just been blocked.
The Descent is a minimalist horror masterpiece. Director Neil Marshall and cinematographer Sam McCurdy create an atmosphere of constant fear using simple yet utterly effective visual techniques. The cinematography is beautiful and scary because it exploits our inherent fears of darkness, claustrophobia and disorientation. In the cave, light is like a gift, and Marshall makes us appreciate it like the women do. Without light, we are left only with our own fears of what may lurk in the darkness. That's why this movie is genuinely scary. Marshall never compromises his visual style even though it is so simple, because he knows it works. Frankly, the film didn't have the option of using many special effects because of its tiny $6.7 million budget, but Marshall manages to create several memorably nightmarish images as well as a lot of deliciously gory violence.
The Descent pays homage to genre classics like Alien, Carrie, Deliverance, and The Blair Witch Project (and even a classic outside of the genre, Apocalypse Now), by incorporating elements from each without losing its own stylistic focus. As a genre exercise, the film succeeds because it establishes a style and sticks to it. For lovers of horror, this is an absolute must-see.