The Descent

Though it has been compared with Ridley Scott’s Alien, the true touchstone for The Descent is Apocalypse Now, with the common thread of a journey downwards or backwards in time into primeval savagery. Writer/director Neil Marshall, here making his second feature after the cult horror/action film Dog Soldiers, takes the camera up above the trees at the beginning of the protagonists’ journey, bringing it down to ground level, and then following the group beneath the earth into dank, primordial caverns and crawlspaces lit only by flares, flashlights, glowsticks and, in a deft touch, the infrared LCD screen of a digital video camera.

Recovering trauma victim Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) reluctantly agrees to accompany five female friends on a spelunking expedition led by adrenaline junkie Juno (Natalie Mendoza). Unknown by the rest of the party, Juno leads them to a previously unmapped cave system that harbours some particularly nasty surprises courtesy of the makeup effects and prosthetics department.

One of the few recent horror films that evokes some genuine fear, The Descent follows the women’s plunge into the darkest, most savage parts of the human soul, and confronts them with monsters both external and internal. The lighting, sound, and production design convincingly elicit the claustrophobic look and feel of a lost cave system. The lighting scheme allows the mind to imagine terror lurking just beyond the reach of luminosity and is used expertly to conceal and, at the appropriate time, suddenly reveal. The visual subtext of the film is of descent, terror, and rebirth, with a main character shown bursting through blood and slime into a frightening new version of the world. The convincing creature design and jolting editing add to the film’s gut-level impact.

If anything mars the film, it is the consistent visual references to other horror films, from Jaws and Carrie to Dario Argento’s Phenomena and Inferno, and the over-reliance on cheap shock cuts (though admittedly the riff on Martin Sheen from the climax of Apocalypse Now is arguably appropriate given the thematic similarity).

The Descent is plenty creepy and scary on its own, and when it stands alone without genre reference, it is an excellent horror thriller and, if nothing else, pegs Marshall as a filmmaker to watch.

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Written and Directed by Neil Marshall

Starring:
Shauna Macdonald....Sarah
Natalie Mendoza....Juno
Alex Reid....Beth
Saskia Mulder....Rebecca
MyAnna Buring....Sam
Nora-Jane Noone....Holly