Into That Dark Goodnight
Small-budget British horror takes us on a plunge into terror in "The Descent."
by Michael Sean McGowan
The Upside: A scary movie that will linger with you for days.
The Downside: It can get very, very grisly.
This is a fierce movie. The Descent is the kind of bloody, clawing, nerve-racking show the term "horror" was created for. It's a film composed, created from familiar parts, yet assembled with such raw smarts and artistry it becomes a singular, unique experience. Some people throw around that over-used term "transcending the genre." The Descent doesn't do this. It simply brings the genre back to its glory days.
The story of The Descent doesn't distinguish itself much from the ever-increasing tide of high-gore, low-budget horror films studios are eyeing now that big dollar blockbusters are collapsing under their own weight. The basic premise- group of people stumble into an unknown, little-explored cave system that's teeming with maniacal creepy-crawlies, is a mirror image of a late summer starter from last year known as The Cave. In fact, seeing the trailers for The Descent I dismissed it as very much of the ordinary, a round-trip ticket to the land of been there, done that. But The Descent is a testimonial to what film critic Roger Ebert has always said distinguishes the stripes of good movies from bad: what makes or breaks a film is rarely what it is about, but how it is about.
Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) is a young wife and mother who still carries a kick for outdoor recreation- in the opening scenes we watch as she and two gal-pals Beth (Alex Reid) and Juno (Natalie Mendoza) navigate Scottish white water rapids. Sarah and Beth are casual weekend warriors, but fitness pro Juno is the kind of person who I imagine daydreams that the term "extreme sports" was created just for her. After the tragic accidental death of Sarah's husband and daughter, she and Beth agree to accompany Juno and a trio of friends (including Juno's lover and fellow high-velocity-impact enthusiast Holly, played by Nora-Jane Noone) on a spelunking exhibition of caves in the Appalachian Mountains. But for reasons that are pleasingly hidden, instead of the typical tourist formation for the average weekend yuppie, Juno leads them into a cave system that's unknown, unnamed, and uncharted. The caverns, with their glistening stalactites and shimmering waterfalls, are a beautiful sight- indeed, one of the many gems of this film is its amazing photography and set direction which are sublimely gorgeous in the opening third, then make that hard right turn to menacing when the movie needs it the most.
In pure Hitchcock fashion, The Descent is a triumph of technique and skill. When part of the cave collapses, the six women have little choice but to plunge through the system, navigating through Coke-bottle crevices and sudden sink holes to find an escape they don't even know exists. There's one part when they reach a ledge overlooking a seemingly endless chasm and one of the women has to climb, hand-by-hand, to the other side to secure a guiding line. What's cool about this is that, in reality, we never see the chasm. Today it would be easy to CGI in a shot showing the bottomless plummet, but director Neil Marshall knows what he's doing. He knows we're going to assume that it's enormous and instead of cheekily confirming it, uses low-angle camera shots and sound effects to play on our imaginations. Marshall captures the minor claustrophobic details (panic caused by slight tremors in overhead rock, the stressed freak-out of one of the women when she mistakes the phosphorous glow of the rocks for sunlight) so perfectly The Descent could have easily been just about a group of people trapped underground and it wouldn't have cut into the tension one bit.
And there is tension here. It's a symptom of the slasher-film age that horror movies have become impatient products, more and more in a hurry to start their mouse trap of carnage. Here, Marshall knows how to wind us up. He uses a balance of dead silences (you know those moments where the musical score stops and you know something is about to happen) and false starts to keep us on edge the entire way through. The first half of The Descent is the steady build- slow, meticulous, careful as the explorers find themselves deeper and deeper underground with their batteries and water waning- and then... The pacing here is so skilled that when the carnivorous monsters finally do show up a good forty minutes in, the movie releases like an orgasm and doesn't let up until the end.
The Descent follows another horror film by Marshall, a straight-to-video title from 2002 called Dog Soldiers about a group of Scottish soldiers who battle werewolves while out on a training mission. This is one I missed, and now I'm kicking myself for it because Dog Soldiers gathered a fair amount of positive ink for a movie of such an unassuming release status and The Descent perhaps cements Marshall's reputation as someone who might be able to resurrect horror movies as something above and beyond grind house nasties. The monsters, bat-like humanoids (products of fine make-up work rather than digital effects- another huzzah) who skitter about the walls and ceilings of the cave eating everything in their path, are not really in a place that can be considered "evil." Films like Saw and Wolf Creek have turned horror into less of an exercise in surprise and suspense than of humiliation and wanton cruelty. While The Descent's creatures can disembowel with the best of them, they're not that different from the zombies in Dawn of the Dead: the terror they create is devoid of any malice- they're just feeding, acting in their nature.
The six women Marshall tosses into his subterranean nightmare are not "brands" that lead to easy identification based on useless archetypes, nor do they fit into easy niches that dictate survival or gruesome end from the word "go." There is one identifiable character here, and what Marshall does with her is fascinating. It's a character role I sometimes call the "Burke" character, from the Paul Reiser character in James Cameron's Aliens. You know this person- in any movie which features a group of people fighting for survival the Burke character is the one willing to screw everyone else over to save his or her life and usually gets killed in some act of supreme cowardice. One of Marshall's characters is kind of a Burke character, but she also varies from the role in such a way that not only her fate, but the fate of everyone, is left hanging on a disquieting, and completely intriguing, note.
This is another thing- looking up info on The Descent after watching it I found message board after message board discussing, debating the movie and its meaning. Like any good shocker, The Descent can't resist ending on a twist, but I discovered that the ending I saw was the truncated one. The original British cut of the film runs a couple of minutes longer and adds just one scene which I won't be stupid enough to spoil for you here. In many cases that one scene would just be one scene, a little bit more running time to burn, but here it creates almost two different films, or at least two different reinterpretations of what we've witnessed, and while fans of the movie will have their preference, the effect is not quantifiable- it's almost like spreadsheet code; you add another variable, you get a different result.
The Descent is an extremely gruesome film, but don't let that dissuade you from seeing a movie whose mechanics so exceptionally frighten you, challenge you, involve you in ways you wouldn't have guessed going in. I walked into The Descent with low expectations- I walked out rolling it around in my head for hours on end; the visual power, the daring moral dance it performs, and was fascinated how a film could be so intelligently multi-layered and down-right scary at the same time. I didn't come away with answers, but you rarely do with any great movie and leave no doubt, The Descent is a splendid, blood-soaked masterpiece of terror and fear and ethereal meaning. The Descent isn't just a good horror movie, it's one of the best films of the year and the perfect artist piece depicting how a master's grasp of terror and the human soul can combine so sublimely to chill us right down to the bone. A
Note: During the review I mentioned the existence of an alternate ending. You can view the last ten minutes of the British cut of The Descent here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xJgAj8HbVs. Please keep in mind that this link is a SPOILER, so your enjoyment of the film as a whole will be better served if you go to this link after watching this incredible film.
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