Psychological thriller then gore-fest...

Rating: 5/10 (12 September 2006)

Not knowing what to expect, the movie started rather well, with various references to other movies (road scene rather like "The Shining" etc.) and the actors were pretty much OK (What Saskia Mulder was doing here was my first question). Like in real life, you wonder why a group of women (who *so* obviously hate each other) would keep together and pretend to have fun, so the directors added a subplot based on the two main character's dislike for each other. So far so good. The caving was felt as getting more and more claustrophobic, and it was done in a way that the viewer would feel it too: dark, narrow passages, noises, flying dust etc. Then the appearance of creatures, I found, were rather too much: the directors could have relied more on the psychological tension and kept going, as the women would have tried to kill each other anyway (as it was a strong probability from the start). Then it went into such a gore, the pool of blood was such a rubbish thing to add to the scenario: the blood should have been congealed anyway. The alternative ending was like a rebirth of the main surviving character, who ends up free, so why spoil it with a birthday cake as a real ending? In this scenario, it is rather a miracle she survived at all, stuck in this manky cave, but a good reason nonetheless to decide to end it all. Maybe there's a lesson to be learnt from the movie: people can only survive in a wild hostile environment if they turn themselves into savages? For that, I'd rather watch "Deliverance" once more, thank you very much.