Some Places Just Aren't For Humans

Rating: 8/10 (28 October 2008)

Neil Marshall's sophomore effort, The Descent, is a savage work that rattles your nerves. Most blood and guts movies today are made essentially for the indiscriminate teen devotees. This is an effective vision of the horror genre. It follows a caving expedition upon which a group of perfectly fit women embark, but it's also a metaphorical plunge into the deep hole where deep fears and true terror are brought to fruition, a descent into primitive anarchy and insanity.
The squirm-inducingly snug canals and hollow cracks within the earth, occasionally given light by pinkish flares, make these characters drain the capacity of their bodies, their relationships, and their basic beliefs about themselves.
Yes, there's a main character, who has undergone a horrible tragedy and needs to be revitalized if she's ever going to survive her depression. The American friend in the close group of adventurous friends is Juno, the daring, fly-by-night instigator of this trip into cavernous Appalachia. There's a little more character development for the first thirty, forty minutes, but really it is just the movie winding up. I have a hard time getting into it at the start; because Marshall does not have an urge to tell the story of these women as individuals but as a collective social circle, I find it difficult to tell them apart. But where the movie comes alive is in the murky, claustrophobic world beneath the scenic facade of the mountains, where the women soon discover there's no way out of this cave but through ithopefully.
Marshall has a way with darkness, too. It can be burdensome, crushing, as when the majority of the screen is black, surrounding a small hole depicting a rock tunnel, and thus we realize that we are the ones who desperately want to see the characters reach daylight again. Even when their flashlights illuminate a good portion of their dominant, overwhelming surroundings, there is a terrorizing barrenness, a space to be satisfied because of the natural restlessness and paranoia brought on by the situation, fulfilled by dangers and trouble, both real and conjured up. These quick-witted visual compositions create an atmosphere of tension and dread that you can cut with a pairing knife.