Encapsulates everything wrong with the modern horror film

Rating: 2/10 (31 August 2008)

Sadly, for me my title says it all. I foolishly chose this as my "evening's entertainment" after a completely misleading comment from someone that it was a "psychological thriller". For me, it turned out to be as far from that description as possible! After a slow build-up that I found tedious rather than interesting - with one exception, the accident near the beginning - things quickly descended into the usual feast of brutality, extreme violence and gore.
Thankfully, the second half of the film takes place in semi-darkness: unlike some members of the audiences of these films, I don't enjoy seeing characters being violently mutilated in close-up.
To summarise, then, what I disliked about this film was its feeble character development (I found I couldn't work out who was being killed or injured and, what's more, I didn't really care); a reliance on "sudden jolts" and brutal violence instead of atmosphere; dialogue often delivered in barely audible "throw away" style. Maybe this was why the revenge subplot made no sense to me and, even at the end, I couldn't work out the relevance of the road accident near the beginning. The idea behind the film also seemed to me a bit of a nonsense - to take a group of people into an unknown cave when only a couple of them are experienced potholers should have struck the whole party as blatantly suicidal.
On the plus side, I was intrigued by the accident near the beginning and its bearing on the rest of the plot - I just found that my revulsion at the second half of the film meant I couldn't give it close enough attention to find out.
Don't get me wrong: I have enjoyed plenty of horror films over the years. Three of my favourites are Carrie, Hellraiser and Witchfinder General. All of these contain blood, violence and brutality. The difference between these films and The Descent is that the nastiness is relevant to their plots, and they all have characters the viewer can empathise with. I'm baffled and disturbed by the popularity of films that seem to wallow in violence for its own sake, and by the number of good reviews The Descent seems to have got.