The Descent (2005)

I couldn't have seen The Descent at a better time in terms of being able to fully experience the film's mood and tone. I'd heard of it when it was released over here in the summer of 2006. It looked interesting judging from the TV spot I saw: an entirely female cast (sort of the reverse of John Carpenter's The Thing), being set entirely in a dark cave system, etc. The commercial didn't really let on as to what the threat in the film was. You could see brief glimpses of what looked like some sort of monsters but you weren't entirely sure if it was that or the characters turning on each other or even if they were just seeing things. Whatever the case, it did look promising. That said, I was starting to become jaded when it came to horror films at that time. I won't say I was cynical but whenever you see critic quotes in a TV spot, I always get a little... cautious, let's say. One quote said it was the best thriller since Alien and that was the main reason for why my thoughts turned a little less enthusiastic (mainly because I think Alien is a boring, severely overrated piece of crud but that's a story for another day). After that, I didn't think much about the film until the following summer when I decided to buy the DVD. When I watched it one Sunday evening, this movie absolutely blew my mind. It was well made, creepy as hell, with plenty of scares, likable characters, well designed and creepy-looking monsters, a lot of a gore, and a tone that's as downbeat as you can get. I absolutely fell in love with this movie and to me, it's the best horror film of the 2000's and I still stand by that.

Like all good horror movies of the 70's and 80's, the plot is pretty basic: a year after losing her husband and young daughter in a horrific car accident, thrill-seeker Sarah and her friend Beth meet up with four other friends at a cabin in the Appalachian Mountains to go on another thrill-seeking adventure that will, hopefully, rejuvenate Sarah's shattered spirit. The six women embark on a spelunking expedition but they don't get too far into the cave system before a cave-in traps them inside. Not only that but Juno, the real adrenaline junkie of the group, is forced to admit that they brought them to a different cave system than the one they were supposed to go to and an unknown one at that, making the chance of rescue zero. The women must now press on through the cave, hoping to find another exit. And as if things couldn't possibly get any worse, the women encounter a race of hideous, carnivorous, human-like creatures that are perfectly adapted to living in the darkness of the caves. Even if there's a way out, the women may not live long enough to reach it.

This was the second film of a really talented filmmaker named Neill Marshall. Before this, he had directed a beloved cult werewolf flick called Dog Soldiers which I was aware of at the time but didn't know that he made until I watched the making of documentary on the DVD. Watching both that and The Descent, you can tell that Marshall loves horror films. He says that he drew inspiration for this film from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, John Carpenter's The Thing, and Deliverance. He said that he wanted to make a horror film where the tension builds slowly, unlike a lot of American horror films nowadays which, according to him, "Take it up to 11 in the first few minutes and then simply can't keep it up." To me, he succeeded completely on that score. Unfortunately, Marshall, like many filmmakers, hasn't been able to top or even match this awesome film. He pretty much killed his directing career with 2008's Doomsday, which I've never seen but I hear is a really bad mess of a movie that copies the Mad Max films and Escape from New York. I don't even know if his follow up to that, Centurion (2010), was ever released over here (I hear it was released on video on demand but I can't verify if there was ever a DVD release). It's a shame too because he had so much potential but I guess he spent it all on this film.

While Dog Soldiers was a campy, fun horror/action flick with a lot of humor, Neil Marshall decided to make The Descent a dark, scary, and downright depressing film. The movie, in fact, opens with the main character, Sarah, losing her husband and young daughter in a very gruesome way. Marshall doesn't pull any punches, letting you know from the beginning what kind of film this is going to be. That's what I took from the film more than anything else: it's a depressing story with a very downbeat ending (I think both cuts of the film have downbeat endings). Remember when I said I saw the movie at the best time to truly experiences its tone and feel? What I meant by that was that I was going through a bout of depression when I first saw the movie and that made the dark tone all the more palpable for me. In fact, I was so emotionally drained by the time it was over that I had to take a break before watching the special features, which I normally go straight into after watching a movie. I had never felt like that after watching a movie before so it was quite an experience but it meant that the movie worked, that it succeeded in conveying what it was trying to (at least to me).

It doesn't hurt the movie that it has a very good cast of strong, capable women who are all likable, even the one who's sort of the heel of the group. The main character, Sarah, is played very well by Shauna Macdonald. You can just see that she is devastated by the loss of her husband and daughter and her crying in Beth's arms in the hospital gives the movie a very hard emotional punch from the get go. It's also clear that she's become very disturbed by the loss as well. Even though she tries to put on a brave face and have fun with her friends, she becomes emotionally distant at points, often having delusions of her daughter with a birthday cake. When they become lost in the caves and eventually encounter the crawlers, she goes from being scared to taking matters into her own hands, fighting the creatures off and becoming drenched in blood, looking very similar to how Carrie White looked at the end of that film. It's also clear that her sanity is cracking as well, not helped by her discovering that Juno had an affair with her husband and that Juno accidentally wounded Beth and left her to die. When she meets back up with Juno near the end of the film, you can see in her eyes that she's lost it. She's lost her sanity so much that she pays Juno back for what she did to Beth: wounding her in the leg and leaving her at the mercy of the crawlers. Depending on what cut of the film you see, I think it's obvious that she's completely cracked by the end, whether it be her making it out of the cave and seeing a ghostly vision of Juno or staying in the cave and finally succumbing to the distress of losing her daughter, much like Jack Torrance succumbing to his demons at the end of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Whatever version you see, Sarah's story does not end happily in my opinion.

Juno, played by Natalie Mendoza, is the one character who's sort of the heel of the group. She's not really a bad person. She just has an ego that leads to her make bad decisions, including having an affair with Sarah's husband, which would have no doubt eventually destroyed Sarah's life even if her husband hadn't died. She's one of the two really big adrenaline junkies of the group, loving adventuring and the outdoors. But, like I said, her ego gets in the way and puts her and her friends in danger. Since she's the one who leads them to an undiscovered cave system, everything that happens is her fault. She didn't cause the cave-in, of course, but she's led them some place where there might not be an exit and no one is going to rescue them. She later claims to Sarah that this adventure was supposed to restore their fractured relationship but Sarah doesn't buy it, hinting at her reckless and egotistical nature. Sarah's friend Beth really doesn't like her, calling her a selfish cow for running out on Sarah after her husband and daughter were killed. Yes, Juno does have her faults but, like I said, she's not a bad person. I think she really does care about Sarah. She refuses to leave the cave without her. There's some good in there, even if she never intended to tell Sarah about the affair with Paul or that she accidentally wounded Beth (which forced Sarah to have to put her out of her misery herself). One thing you really can't deny about Juno is that she's tough. The whole time she's fighting with the crawlers, wrestling and stabbing them to death, kicking ass, taking names, etc. She's a tough broad! So I did like Juno, even if she was the most flawed of the bunch.

One of my personal favorite characters is Alex Reid as Sarah's best friend, Beth. Firstly, she does come off as a true friend. She's the one who comforts Sarah in the hospital at the beginning of the film when she's distraught over the death of her husband and daughter. When they're driving up to the cabin, Beth tells Sarah that they don't have to do this if she doesn't want to. She's looking out for her friend, knowing that she hasn't gotten over what happened yet. And like I said, she doesn't think much of Juno, calling her a piece of work for leaving Sarah behind after the accident and, when they become trapped in the cave, letting Juno herself know how she feels about her, that she's an untrustworthy, selfish, egotistical jerk in her eyes. She especially admonishes her for putting Sarah in such a situation. Not only is she a good friend but I also like that she has a real sense of humor as well. My favorite instance with her is when the girls are gathered in the cabin's living room and she comes out in these girly pajamas, proceeding to say that they were a present and nothing more. It's also funny when she tries to calm Sarah down when she gets stuck in a tunnel and says, "How do you give a lemon an orgasm? You tickle its citrus." Unfortunately for her, her suspicions about Juno become justified when Juno accidentally puts a pick through her neck and leaves her to die. She also inadvertently discovers Juno's affair with Sarah's husband Paul at that moment and she later begs Sarah to kill her, which she eventually does. It's a fairly heartbreaking end to a character that I particularly liked.

Probably my least favorite characters are Rebecca (Saskia Mulder) and her younger sister Sam (MyAnna Buring). Now, I don't hate them, mind you. They're just the characters that I honestly didn't care that much about. For one, Rebecca's voice sort of got on my nerves, particularly when she's going on about safety in caving to her little sister. As for Sam, she doesn't really do much of anything. She's a med student and is the one who has to set Holly's broken leg at one point and Juno also asks her if she knows what the crawlers are at one point. You also get the impression that she's the typical younger sister who appreciates her older sister but is also annoyed by her constantly having to look out for her. Rebecca often acts more like a mother than and older sister but, interestingly, there's a point where Sam appears to be much more mature than she is. When Juno kills a crawler that attacked them, Rebecca is panicked and insists upon moving forward whereas Juno and Sam calmly try to figure what the crawlers are. They don't do much else with their relationship, however, and that's why they're my least favorites. Again, I don't despise them, I just found them to be the least developed of the characters. I still found their deaths to be particularly gruesome and horrific, though, so I guess that's something.

Finally, there's another favorite character of mine, Nora-Jane Noone as Holly, a newcomer to the group. Like Juno, she's a big adrenaline junkie, "always looking for the next big high," as she says herself. I just can't help but love this tough, Irish tomboy of a woman with a spiky haircut. She also has a big sense of humor, like Beth. I always smirk when she's doing stretches and falls over or when a bunch of bats scares them at the entrance to the cave and she acts like the count from Sesame Street, saying, "One bat. Two bats. Fifty bats. Ha ha ha!" Since she's a newcomer, she's the only member of the group unaware of what happened to Sarah. You assume that Juno would have told her but she doesn't seem to know why Sarah is acting so distant at points. (Then again, knowing Juno, she might not have told her after all.) Speaking of her friendship with Juno, it starts to crack when they become trapped in the cave and Juno says that she led them to this undiscovered system because Holly was right when she said that Boreham Caverns, the caves they were supposed to be in, was a boring, tourist trap. Holly immediately yells, "Don't try and pin this fucking shite on me!" To me, that shows that while Holly may be a thrill-seeker like Juno, she's more responsible and wouldn't have done this. Unfortunately for Holly, her own recklessness causes her to go running blindly into the dark when she thinks she sees daylight and leads to her falling down a pit and breaking her leg. As such, the toughest of the girls ends up becoming the crawlers' first victim due to that injury.

Even though they're killed at the very beginning, I feel I do have to mention Sarah's husband Paul (Oliver Milburn) and her daughter Jessica (Molly Kayll). Paul has the distinction of being the only man in the entire movie and even though he doesn't do or say much in his limited screen time, his actions make sense when you discover the affair between him and Juno later on. He goes out of his way to help Juno at the very beginning during the opening whitewater rafting trip when she falls into the water. Although I didn't pay it much attention the first time, the look they exchange when he helps her onto the bank speaks volumes. Also, notice that Beth seems to think that it's odd as well, cementing her suspicions of Juno right from the start. Also, when he, Sarah, and Jessica are driving back, he looks like he's in turmoil emotionally, hinting at what I was talking about earlier that he could be planning to leave Sarah for Juno. Young Jessica has even less screen time and dialogue but the love her mother has for her exemplified enough in the car ride. She also becomes a key figure throughout the film because Sarah keeps having delusions about her and a birthday cake since she died not long before her birthday. Those delusions are why I prefer the UK ending to the film because it justifies their  importance to the plot in that Sarah has completely lost her mind by the end of the film and the delusions have taken over entirely. She really does believe that her daughter is their with her in the cave and, as Neil Marshall himself said, that could be the only way she could be remotely happy after everything that has happened to her (I'll expound on that later).

A major factor that aids the film's atmosphere and creepiness are the exquisitely designed cave sets by Simon Bowles. These sets are so believable in their construction and lighting that you'd swear this movie was filmed in a real cave. They're wet with a lot of stalactites and stalagmites, pools of water, mazes of tunnels, and tight squeezes. There's both open areas and very claustrophobic tight passages. What's even more amazing is that there were only a few set-pieces that were reused again and again, with careful redecorating and lighting to make it look like a different part of the cave system each time. It's an amazing job and for someone who's been caving many times like I have, it does look as real as possible. Like I said, there are a lot of claustrophobic tight squeezes, just as you tend to run into in real caves. I'm not claustrophobic per se but when I've been caving and have had to shimmy through tight tunnels and spaces, I learned how it can get pretty frightening if you get stuck and start to panic. This movie did a good job of conveying that terror in my opinion. The part where Sarah gets stuck while climbing through a tunnel early in the exploration is particularly terrifying to me, especially when the cave-in starts. Not only are the caves well designed but the lighting is realistic as well. This is a very, very dark movie, both in tone and in look. The only light is from the helmet lights, the glow sticks, and the infrared mode of the camera the women bring with them, such as it would be if you were in a real cave. I don't know how Marshall managed to direct and light a film that's so dark but he did a very good job. All these factors help make the movie a literal descent into a dark and terrifying subterranean world, both for the characters and for the audience.

The hideous crawlers that inhabit the cave don't come into the movie until very late in. In fact, I would say that you don't get a glimpse of them until when there's only forty-five minutes left in the film. Like any good horror director, Marshall knows that suggestion is more frightening than actually seeing the threat. We see the crawlers in the shadows, silently stalking the women or a far off shot of one drinking from a pool (which is a eerie image in and of itself) before they make their first real appearance in one of the best scares ever when we see one of them behind the women through the POV of the infrared camera. Even after that when they start to come out in full force, we never see them fully lit. They're always in the shadows and back-lit, with only small glimpses telling us how hideous they are in the way they look. The only times you get a really good sense of what they look like are the scenes where the crawlers appear in the light of the glow sticks. To me, the design of the crawlers was really look. They are as creepy and disgusting as you can get with their pale skin, bat-like ears, glazed over blind eyes, and sharp teeth. What really makes them freaky is that they're humanoid in their appearance but they look and sound animals. Marshall said that they're cavemen that never left the cave and have evolved to live perfectly in the darkness. Cavemen or not, their screeching, growling, and echolocation-like clicking noises just add to their eeriness for me. The scene that never fails to disturb me is when Sarah, after getting separated from the others, awakes in a communal feeding ground and has to remain absolutely still and quiet while the crawlers feed on what's left of Holly. The sounds that the crawlers make as they feed just freaks me out to no end and, again, the fact that they look human but are acting and sounding like wild animals with their kill is just so disturbing. Plus, that's a terrifying situation as Sarah tries to remain still and quiet while one crawler walks up to her and snarls right into the infrared camera she's using to see. That always gives me chills.

I have heard some criticisms about the crawlers being the film's biggest weakness. One is that their biology and evolution doesn't make sense, with questions such as how do they get the nutrition necessary to survive? If they go to the surface to get food, why don't they just stay up there? Why are the males completely bald whereas the one noticeable female that you see has long black hair? If their sense of smell is highly developed along with their sense of hearing, why aren't they able to sniff out the women as well as hear them? How can they climb the walls so gracefully when they have no apparent ways of sticking or latching onto the rock? While some are valid, all these criticisms kind of annoy me because it makes wonder if people have become so nitpicky and cynical that they can't enjoy an awesome movie when one finally comes around as opposed to all the crap we have to wade through nowadays? While some of those questions are, again, valid, whatever happened to suspension of disbelief? Does everything have to be so ultra realistic now that escapism is just thrown out the window? And as for that criticism of how the crawlers evolved, while part of it may have been because Marshall was trying to tell a story and didn't want to waste time discussing the evolution of creatures that don't exist, I've always felt that it's better when they let you come up with this stuff on your own. You're shown these creatures, given an idea of where they came from, and you're left to come up with their biology and history on your own. Isn't that more interesting than just being given every little minute facet from the very beginning? I'm just saying.

One criticism that I do think is interesting is that the first half of this film is so good, so well-made, tense, suspenseful, and downbeat that the crawlers are almost not needed. That's kind of true, actually. This movie could have just been about madness and paranoia in being trapped in a cave system with no way out and how far a person will go to survive. You already kind of have that aspect in the film but I guess some feel that when the crawlers show up, it turns what could have been a tense psychological thriller into a gory monster movie. I do agree that it would have been interesting had Marshall decided not to include the crawlers and go the psychological route but I think the crawlers do add an even bigger layer of dread to the one that was already there, that not only could these women be trapped in the cave forever but there's also a very real threat to their lives down there with them. I've even heard some ideas that the crawlers might not even exist, that Sarah was in a coma ever since the car accident and that the rest of the film is a nightmare she has. The evidence people make up to support this idea is that you supposedly hear the crawlers growl when Sarah wakes up in the hospital and stumbles into the hallway. I personally have never heard the sound that they're talking about but it is an interesting idea. There's another theory that Sarah may actually be the one who's killing everybody and the crawlers are just manifestations of her damaged psyche. I personally don't like that because there's too much evidence to the contrary and if the film had gone that route, it would have ended up like High Tension, which I think is one of the worst psychological horror films ever made. My personal belief is that, no matter what version of the film you see, the crawlers are real. But that's just how I choose to view the film.

Besides the design of the crawlers, there are plenty of other great makeup effects in the movie. This is one violently gory film and it shows no mercy from the very beginning. The opening death of Paul and Jessica where they're impaled by a bunch of long pipes when their car hits the back of a truck carrying them is very vicious and sets the tone very well. You don't see Jessica get impaled but the implication is enough. Before they reach the cave, the women also find a dead elk, which no doubt killed by the crawlers. Even though you only see it briefly, it really does look like a decomposing carcass (they put real maggots on it too to make it even grosser: blegh!). The makeup effect that always makes me just cringe is when Holly falls down this hole, breaks her leg, and you can see the bone sticking out of the skin. It's even more painful when they have to set the bone and tie a tourniquet around it. The blood oozing out and Nora-Jane Noone's screams of agony really sell it. It also makes me wince when Rebecca slashes her hand open on the rope when it slides really hard against her skin. That had hurt to like crap! The killings caused by the crawlers and the way the crawlers themselves are killed are very nasty as well. Throats are ripped open (again, Holly's gurgled screaming when she dies makes it even more horrific), the bodies of the victims are seen being eaten, a pickaxe is used to smash open the creatures' heads, Beth accidentally gets a pickaxe through the neck, eyes are gouged out either by sharp bones or by fingers (the latter being a nod to The Evil Dead), and so on. The most iconic image of the movie is when Sarah falls into a huge pool of blood and comes out completely covered in it. That image was even put on the DVD cover. So, yeah, violence-wise, this isn't a movie for the squeamish.

This is one of the few movies in recent years that had me genuinely on edge at certain points. The movie is just so dark and unforgiving that I was on edge even before they entered the cave. One scare that got me not only on the first viewing but several times afterward is a nightmare that Sarah has early on where she hears something at the cabin window, walks up to it, hears her daughter giggle, and then a pole bursts through and punctures her head. That freaked me out so much. Another tense moment is when they enter the first big cavern in the cave and Sarah goes off to explore by herself. The film becomes very quiet as Sarah looks around the chamber and the only sound is a drop of water hitting a puddle. It's unnerving and you're just waiting for something to attack her. I also remember that after the crawlers showed up, there was a scene where Rebecca and Sam have to go around this corner and I was actually putting my hands in front of my face because I didn't want to look at the screen. That almost never happens to me so in my opinion, that's a sign that the movie does its job well.

Throughout the entire movie, the tone is as completely depressing and emotionally exhausting as you can get. You see Sarah lose everything that's precious to her throughout the film: her friends, her family, everything. She's put through extreme measures all the way to the ending. As I've mentioned, the ending to the American cut of the movie is different from the UK cut. Some say that the American version has a more optimistic ending but I personally think both cuts end on a very downbeat note. The UK version (which is the version on the unrated DVD) ends with her seemingly escaping the cave, getting to their van, driving away only to stop and be confronted by a ghostly vision of Juno sitting beside her. She then wakes up to discover that she's still in the cave and she again sees the image of her daughter with the birthday cake, meaning that her sanity is totally gone by this point. The movie then fades to black as we hear the crawlers scream, hinting that she was probably killed. The American goes to black when she screams after seeing the ghostly vision of Juno, saying that she did actually escape but has still lost her mind. Neil Marshall has said that both endings are downbeat and hopeless. He compares the UK ending to that of John Carpenter's The Thing, where the characters aren't dead but there's no hope for them even so. He compared the American ending to that of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, meaning that it's not a happy ending even though she's gotten away. He also said that he feels that the American ending is even more mean-spirited than the UK ending because she's gotten away but she's also lost everybody she loves so what does she have to live for now? Marshall says that even though she's trapped in the caves in the UK ending and is eventually going to be killed by the crawlers, at least in her damaged psyche she's with her daughter and she has found happiness in some strange way. Like I've said, though, I think both endings are bleak since she's completely lost it in both of them. No matter how much Lionsgate tried to make the ending somewhat happy, there was just no way to do it. This is a dark, downbeat film where nobody gets away unscathed. I do prefer the UK ending though. It's mainly because that's the version I've always seen but it's also the most logical ending as well. In real life, she probably wouldn't just happen upon an exit so that's why I prefer this ending.

Just the way the film looks is depressing. Before the women enter the cave, there's only one, maybe two, instances where you see sunlight. The rest of the time the sky is always overcast and dreary looking and it also looks like it's really cold as well. Even the film itself has a muted, gray look to the colors. It's not the bleach bypass process but it does look very gray. The only time there are any vivid colors is when the girls take out their glow-sticks and the screen is bathed in a deep red or a deep green. Otherwise, all you have to look at is the utter blackness of the cave or the yellow-brown light that the flares and torches give off. There's such a lack of color and sunshine in this film that it's quite overpowering and adds to the mood.

The final touch to the film's tone is David Julyan's score. The film itself at least has some humor here and there. The music, on the other hand, has not one happy note throughout. The main theme and a majority of the music has the most tragic, almost operatic sound to it, expounding on Sarah's tragic losses throughout the film and how she will most likely die in the caves. It especially gets overwhelming near the end when Sarah and Juno stand off against each other after killing a large group of crawlers and Sarah reveals to Juno that she knows about the affair. In fact, after Sarah and Juno meet back up with each other right before this, there's no dialogue throughout the rest of the movie. All you're left with are the sounds and the music, making for an emotionally exhausting final act. When the music isn't being downbeat, it's being one of two things: scary or mysterious. When they first enter the cave and begin exploring, the music that plays has a very eerie, creepy sound to it, signifying the unknown world they're entering. The moments where they're having to be completely still and silent while there are crawlers nearby is just out and out horror music and it's as unpleasant as it possibly can be. When they're attacked by the crawlers and fight back, the music does become exciting but it still has that scary and downbeat sound to it. All in all, the music is mainly what will have you emotionally drained by the end of the film.

Interestingly enough, a similar horror film called The Cave was in production at virtually the same time as The Descent. It was seen as such a competitor that the filmmakers decided to make sure to finish The Descent and get it into theaters before The Cave. You'd think that this rushed production schedule would have hurt the film but, as I've been describing throughout this entire review, the movie is an incredible horror film in all respects. I've never seen The Cave but I think it's rated PG-13, which is never a good sign for a horror film, and it was a big critical and commercial failure while The Descent, despite being released in the UK around the same time as the London bombing which no doubt stopped it from being more successful, made $57 million worldwide and was also critically acclaimed. While I've never seen The Cave (and I doubt I ever will), I'm pretty sure that the audiences and critics made the better choice in this instance.

In my humble opinion, The Descent is quite simply the best horror film of the 2000's. It's everything that a good horror film should be: creepy, atmospheric, and unapologetic. Neil Marshall knew what kind of movie he was making and just went for it. I will never forget the impact the movie had on me when I first saw it. There could be other horror films from the 2000's that I haven't seen that could give this film a run for its money but to me, stuff like The Devil's Rejects, High Tension, Saw, and Hostel are just not in the same league as this movie. This film is scarier than all those because it plays on what I think is the most palpable fear of all: that of the unknown, of what might be waiting for us in the dark. Maybe it's just personal preference but to me, you just can't get more terrifying than that.