Critics' choice for the most likely "best horror movie of the year"

Rating: Null/10 (8 August 2006)

(watched in Toronto)
I am among the group of regular movie goers who like to check out critics' reviews before seeing a movie. I was slightly surprised at the unanimity and enthusiasm in the critics' praise of this movie. Having watched the movie, I can see that they have their reasons.
If you know nothing at all about the movie (maybe you should stop reading this, right now), you would be thinking, during the first half of the movie, that you are watching an adventure-turned-disaster movie along the line of "Vertical Limit" or "Into the void". There may be just that additional hint of psychological flavour, as the main protagonist Sarah (Shauna Macdonald), right at the beginning of the movie, suffers a devastating loss of husband and daughter in a traffic accident, with steel rods impaling the windshield and victims.
I don't need to elaborate the nightmares that haunt Sara in the ensuring year, at the end of which her two best friends who were with her at a white water adventure just before the accident try to help her get out of the sinking feeling by, ironically, organizing an exploration of descending into a cave. Three more women are added to the group. While they think that they are all taking a relatively "safe" adventure trip, under the experienced guidance of Juno (Natalie Mendoza)their leader, into a charted course, Juno harbours a more ambitious plan of exploring a hitherto untouched cave, thereby giving them the naming right, her idea of cheering Sara up.
As I said, the first half, although already gripping in its own right, provides the tension and thrills in the form of natural accidents. The real meat comes with the discovering of carnivorous cave dwellers that look like Gollum, move like the Aliens and operate like bats (totally blind, relying on their other senses to move around the bowels of the earth). Towards the end, the story takes on very much the route of Sigourney Weavers "Aliens" (i.e. with an "s", the second one) and much satisfaction can be obtained by watching the heroines' ferocious destruction of the ultra-vicious villains.
There is not one thing in particular that makes this movie outstanding; it's how it all fits together. In this British movie, you don't see the banal, formulaic Hollywood treatment such as trying to give each character a special, but superficial "story". This is Sara and Juno's story, and is left at that. There is unquestionably a great deal of gore, but no blatantly exposed as in the standard run-of-the-mill horrors, but cleverly softened, taking advantage of the various lightings used in the underground cavern. There are lots of referential tributes to various scenes in a good number of movies, as the critics point out, which I wouldn't repeat. There are well paced actions and thrills. There are explorations into a deeper layer of psychology, which tactfully avoid the pitfall of being too pretentious and overbearing. Yes, there are logical aspects that can be challengesd such as how can human beings have any chance at all in the underground environ that is the home tuft of these "crawlers"  they had enough trouble with the deadly terrine even before these things show up. But all in all, this is a movie that you do not find much fault with, and that is perhaps why it has become the critics' favourite.