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August 21, 2006

The Descent

An A Plus B Film

By Ben

There was once an episode of Thunder in Paradise in which Hulk Hogan and two or three other people were trapped inside a cave that was rapidly filling up with water. It's a memory I often think of, but of the countless hours of television I watched growing up, why this moment? Is it because I was so blown away by Mr. Hogan's superhuman lung capacity and the improbable subsequent survival of everyone involved? No, it's because caves are just that scary. Scarier than submarines in fact, but only by a little bit (Das Boot had me gasping for breathe everytime I watched someone crawl into one of those cramped bunkbeds).

Regardless of all this, when I first read about Neil Marshall's The Descent I knew I had to see it. Horror film fans, including myself, are always on the lookout for the film that's going send us searching through our closets for that nightlight we thought we had grown out of. According to the prerelease buzz, this was going to be it.

The film starts off like most horror films, establishing the normal life of the protagonist(s). Although a co-worker described the film as being about "a group of nubile young girls trapped together in a dark, wet cave," in Marshall's defense, it just so happens that a normal day for Sarah and her friends is to go whitewater rafting while the husband takes care of the kid. Any accusations that he might be trying to evoke any sense of sexiness by centering the film around a group of women is thereby quashed when they come roaring down the river in life-jackets and helmets. Now, I'm not the most stylish person but I do know that life-jackets and helmets are not sexy.

Unfortunately, all the fun that Sarah is having quickly comes to a halt when her husband and daughter die in a car accident that's brilliantly staged by Marshall. Now that the main character has been saddled with the obligatory emotional baggage, we fast forward one year to a spelunking trip with her friends who are out to show her a good time and get her mind off the events of the previous year.

The cast of characters is made up of the typical types you would expect in any film about a band of people stuck in an extraordinary sitaution. There's the tough guy er... girl, the rational girl, the wild girl, and the girl who can't pull herself together until the very end when it really really matters. This film is no exception and the roles of each character are clearly defined in a short, effecient sequence taking place the night before the expedition. The sequence is refreshing in its focus on progressing the story and the fact that all the girls aren't sitting around in skimpy outfits talking about their wild sexual exploits, the sort of scene one would expect in a horror film.

In the morning, as the women hike to the entrance of the cave, the most experienced of the bunch reels off a grocery list of horrible things people experience in caves that includes: total darkness, disorientation, claustrophobia, and aural and visual hallucination. It's a warning to her fellow cavers and a manifesto directed at the audience telling us what we too are about to experience.

The thrills begin not too soon after they enter the cave with a scene in which part of the cave begins collapsing while Sarah is crawling through a particularly tight space, it will have most viewers gasping for air and nervously laughing when it's over. After that tunnel collapses it's revealed that was the only known way in and that one of the women had lied and brought them to an unexplored cave so that they could "discover it together." This brought a smile across my face, reassuring me that even women have moments of extreme idiocy and hubris. But, this also meant that they were going to have to venture further into the cave in an effort to find a way out and I would be doing much more squirming.

The rest of the film is a relentlessly paced typical (only in the sense of the plot) horror film in which the victims are picked off by strange humanoid flesh eating cave creatures. What makes the film so enjoyable is the highly effective use of the environment in which it's set. Throughout most of the latter half of the film, most of the screen seems to be enveloped in darkness leaving the viewer to actively search for visual signs while the sound design has audiences hearing all sorts of strange noises from the front, left, right, and most effectively: behind.

The (lack of) lighting is nothing short of audacious but it may have also been born out of necessity. One thing the film misses when they first enter the cave is wide, beautiful shots of the interior. This is probably because the film was almost entirely shot on a soundstage so the sparse lighting helped to obscure that fact.

The film was the most enjoyably effective horror film that I've seen since The Blair Witch Project almost seven years ago. While the film does make liberal use of the startle effect to elicit screams from the audience, it earns them through careful timing, deliberate camerawork, and clever editing patterns. As a result, you as the viewer don't feel cheated or manipulated, instead you feel like you're in the hands of a filmmaker who really knows what he's doing. Upon viewing his previous film, Dog Soldiers, it's clear that Marshall really knows how to wind up an audience and his sense of "horrific timing" (the horror film equivalent of "comedic timing") is perfect.

The Descent evokes films ranging from Radiers of the Lost Ark, in its highly skilled handling of what is otherwise essentially just a B-movie, to Aliens in its use of strong (albeit by the standards of a male-centric society) female characters in terrifying situations. Along the way, Marshall also references Apocalypse Now, Carrie and a slew of other films yet the film never feels derivative of others. This is probably due to the fact that as a horror film it's wholly refreshing, a movie that's actually scary, doesn't rely on gore to shock audiences, and isn't a remake of a classic horror film. It's an entertaining and genuinely scary B-Movie that for one brief moment when I got home to my dark empty apartment, made me wish I had a nightlight.

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