director/screenwriter
Neil Marshall
producer
Christian Colson
cinematographer
Sam McCurdy
music
David Julyan
editor
Jon Harris
cast
Shauna Macdonald (Sarah)
Natalie Mendoza (Juno)
Alex Reid (Beth)
Saskia Mulder (Rebecca)
MyAnna Buring (Sam)
Nora-Jane Noone (Holly)
Oliver Milburn (Paul)
Molly Kayll (Jessica)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 99m
u.k.
release: 7/8/05
u.s.
release: 8/4/06
video
availability: DVD
official
website
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The Descent,
a mercilessly effective horror film from Britain, is not a movie
I'd recommend to claustrophobics. Or maybe I would, if I were
feeling sadistic. After all, it is a horror movie, and
when we go to a horror movie we expect to feel emotions like,
y'know, horror. Usually we don't. This time we do. Written
and directed by Neil Marshall, who made the well-liked werewolf
film Dog Soldiers in 2002, The Descent arrives
with all sorts of advance hype about how nerve-wracking and gut-wrenching
it is, and for once a movie earns its buzz. Once it gets going,
it shakes you and keeps shaking you.
Six young women of various
nationalities get together to explore a cave in the Appalachians.
One of them, Sarah (Shauna Macdonald), endured a tragedy one
year ago, and the other women hope to get her mind off things
and surround her with support and excitement. The ringleader
is Juno (Natalie Mendoza), who's somewhat arrogant about the
great adventurer she is, or pretends to be; she even has an apprentice
of sorts, the spiky-haired wild card Holly (Nora-Jane Noone,
from The Magdalene Sisters).
Rounding out the sextet are compassionate Beth (Alex Reid), climbing
expert Rebecca (Saskia Mulder), and med student Sam (MyAnna Buring).
As it happens, everyone ends up grateful to have a med student
along.
About two miles down, a cave-in
blocks the women's way out, and they have to find or make another
exit. Between this movie and World Trade Center,
being buried alive seems to be the en vogue terror of
the month. That would be traumatic in itself, but Marshall ups
the ante with subterranean cannibals who live in the cave and
presumably subsist on would-be explorers. They look like a bunch
of Gollums, though the credits identify them as "crawlers."
The monsters are a slight letdown -- the make-up on them doesn't
always fool the eye -- but the way the first of them is fully
introduced to the group is a memorably chilling image.
The Descent has two different endings depending
on what country you see it in; we in America are getting a slightly
shorter version, whereas the Brit edition is bleaker and brings
back Sarah's frequent birthday-cake vision for one last hurrah
(you can see it here). I've seen both, and the American ending
(approved by the director, who wanted to see how this alternate
finish would fly with a different audience) is, in its way, more
disturbing. Either way would be a proper way to seal off a film
that plays for keeps and isn't afraid to turn its likable, strong
characters into moral weaklings who will do what they must to
survive.
Indeed, the true horror of
the movie -- especially its one indisputably shocking moment
-- lies not in crawling, squealing Gollums but in the film's
certainty that even these smart, well-prepared women can be undone
by their own flaws. The women are drawn swiftly yet definitively;
nobody acts out of character, and so we don't roll our eyes at
rash or ill-advised actions that, in a lesser movie, would simply
strike us as stupid. The Descent isn't an exercise in
unmotivated sadism like last year's Wolf Creek,
the previous heavily-hyped horror import. That film wanted to
be a gnarly endurance test but came off as callow showmanship
-- like a ten-year-old boy, it wanted to wow you with how grotesque
it could be. The Descent is an endurance test, too, but
it gives you something worth enduring, and -- for some, I'm sure
-- just barely endurable. Even the sequences of no particular
menace, when the women are squeezing themselves through the tight
nooks and crannies of that godforsaken cave, press down hard
on your chest. I didn't go into The Descent particularly
claustrophobic, but I think I might be now.
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