--Sam, The Descent
A great cast that is probably unfamiliar to American audiences, a simple premise, and a very well-handled creature make The Descent an excellent horror film. In calling the premise simple, I am referring to a simplicity like that of Alien, an absence of storytelling bloat that allows for a very focused movie that does not take longer than it needs to to before it introduces drama and mystery. With characters that interact so organically and a general commitment to subtlety over jumpscares, this is a movie that does not trip on the more common shortcomings of horror cinema and films in general. There is thankfully no descent into mediocrity or artistic incompetence here! It is not the most thematically complex horror movie, but practically everything about the film reflects a higher degree of talent and care. Hell, it even passes the Bechdel test while having a cast of almost exclusively women that do not have a weak link between their performances.
Production Values
The first shot of The Descent's species of monster is the opposite of the low-effort jumpscare. So are the second and third shots, with the creature only getting direct, closeup attention from the camera more than halfway through the entire film. When it is first seen, a large area near the very entrance of the cave is bathed in red light from a flare, the broad cavern is in view of the camera, with a main character in the foreground on the right and a silhouette in the distant background on the left that soon crouches down. The contrast between the colors red and black is fittingly revisited after this shot. Before the creature is seen again later on, though, there are shots of the characters crawling through passageways that would strike terror into the minds of claustrophobes--along with Blair Witch, The Descent has among the best shots of narrow crawlspaces in recent cinematic history, if not beyond the past decades. Before they even enter the cave, the characters interact with each other in such a natural way that their laughter, sarcasm, pain, and loss establish them as realistic. As I specified before, this is not a cast that would be easy to recognize for people who primarily watch mainstream American films, but they are absolutely right at home in their roles. Shauna McDonald plays the most central of all the characters, Sarah, and Natalie Mendoza is her friend Juno, who hopes to use a spelunking trip to rekindle the former relationship they had before Sarah's husband and child died. The rest of the fairly sizeable cast contributes to the organic portrayal of friendship--and desperation once the trip becomes a nightmare.
Story
Some spoilers are below.
After a rafting trip with her friends, Sarah's husband and young daughter are both killed in a car accident. The next year sees the friends, along with some new members, reunite to go spelunking in the Appalachian Mountains. When a narrow crawlspace is sealed by rocks, the women are forced to continue deeper into the caves. Though the friends appreciate risky pastimes, one of them has brought the group to an unlisted cave system, revealing that they are not in the caves she had mentioned because she wanted them to be the ones to first explore a place no one has supposedly visited. The underground network is ultimately the living area for a species of evolutionary divergents from humans that have adapted to the darkness.
Intellectual Content
Focusing on friendship and betrayal rather than other horror subject matter like the epistemology of supernatural beings or existentialism in cosmic horror, The Descent explores the relationship of two of the women in particular as the different ways one of them is an awful friend come to light. Juno, as it turns out, has not only had an affair with Sarah's dead husband, but she also lied to her friends about which caves they were headed to in order to surprise and excite them at the possibility of naming a new area--which of course is why they end up trapped with vicious humanoids. However, one of the things that is almost presented as a reason for Sarah to eventually wound Juno and leave her as bait for the cave's "crawlers" is that she accidentally pierced the neck of her friend Beth with her pickaxe, expecting to find one of the hostile creatures when she turned around (she had just fought one of them). When Sarah stumbles upon a dying Beth later on, the latter tells her not to trust Sarah because she is responsible for her injury, but, despite Juno having had an affair and damning the group to get trapped in the wrong cave, it this her unintentional wounding of Beth that is treated as the final straw that makes her deserve to die. That Sarah makes it to the end as the film's "final girl" puts her in a position classically reserved for the morally superior character in a horror story, and yet near the end, Sarah uses her pickaxe to make Juno scream so she can use her as bait while she escapes. A morally superior final girl would not murder someone for an accidental tragedy, even if Juno does deserve to die for other reasons by Biblical standards (the only moral standard supported by any evidence).
Conclusion
Even though it does sometimes feature jumpscares, The Descent does not stand on them, and even though not every character can get the same amount of development when the cast is so large, the acting more than carries the story--and there is at least one character who does have a clear arc. Expertly utilizing its actresses, its color scheme, and the cave sets that were remixed to hide how limited they really were, this is a film that embodies the positive kind of straightforwardness in horror that often works out far better than more popular tactics. Simplicity is not always gratuitous or lacking in depth. The Descent shows just how intense a simple premise can be and how emotionally authentic portrayals of friendship in movies need to be. In addition to this, the way its large female cast is so human and natural without the film specifically calling attention to the fact that they are women is, no matter how underappreciated it is, a genuine triumph for female characterization from almost 20 years ago, well before the push for more realistic female characters was as strong as it is today. The Descent simply gets so much of what it does right that there is little that could have been improved.
Content:
1. Violence: A driver is impaled by poles early on, which involves blood. Pickaxes are used to repeatedly hack into attacking creatures.
2. Profanity: "Fuck," "shit" (and its British version "shite"), "bitch," and "bastard are used.
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