A year after the tragic death of her husband and child, Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) joins her extreme sports colleagues Juno (as Natalie Mendoza) and Beth (Alex Reid), and three other girls for a weekend of spelunking. Juno says she’s taking them to a well-known spot, but actually brings them to an unexplored cavern. A cave-in leaves them trapped and without hope of rescue, and things get worse when Sarah sees a humanoid shape in the shadows.
The Descent is the most frightening film of the year, and may be in the top ten of all time. My view was reinforced by the actions of the theater-goers around me at the late night, Sundance screening. People screamed, jumped, and in several cases, fell from their chairs. One girl bit the arm of her date. Mixed in was unsteady laughter and a few heartily-felt cheers. I have never seen (or heard) such an extreme reaction to a film. A seldom realized goal of most horror films is to scare, and in that respect, The Descent is stunningly successful.
Writer-director Neil Marshall, who made a name for himself with his relatively light, indie werewolf thriller, Dog Soldiers, sets the tension level high and never allows for a moment of release. There’s no humor here, and while that normally is a failing, jokes would be out of place in The Descent. The setting—darkened caves and claustrophobic tunnels—pushes the sanity of the characters and is likely to do a job on your brain as well. Even when the situation is relatively safe for Sarah and her friends, I felt slightly uncomfortable. Jaws kept people out of the water. This will do a better job of dissuading anyone from entering a cavern, den, or even large hole.
If the environment isn’t enough to set you on edge, the rapidly disintegrating relationships should do the trick. The ambiguity of the characters, particularly with Juno who may have had an affair with Sarah’s husband, or perhaps just wanted to, leaves nothing stable. Who is a hero and who is a villain? That’s a question Marshall prefers not to answer. There’s plenty here to make you feel uneasy long before Sarah sees something that shouldn’t be there, moving just out of eyesight.
With superb camera work, better-than-average acting, interesting-if-underdeveloped characters, a fast pace, and a score that enhances the dread, The Descent needs nothing more to be a great horror film. However, it could use something less. This is a case of the filmmakers not knowing what they had. Somehow, Marshall and company missed that this is a relentless, anxiety-producing, fright fest, so they added cheap jump scares. There are birds that suddenly fly at the screen (convinced that this is a 3-D film) accompanied by a fifty decibel increase in the soundtrack. Then bats do the same thing. Then people pop up immediately behind our hero. These moments make it hard to take the film seriously and toss it into the realm of teen slasher when it should be much more. Additionally, Marshall has his characters act stupidly to get into trouble. Considering the situation they are in, this is unnecessary. There’s plenty of ways for them to get themselves injured or killed without having a character foolishly run off from the group.
Then there is the ending. The original British ending has been altered for U.S. distribution and already there are numerous arguments across the Internet on which is the “good” one. That’s easy. Neither. Nor are they different enough to be worthy of debate. Both imply that some, or most, of the events in the film didn’t take place. Such it-was-all-a-dream-type twists were clever in the mid ’30s, but wore out their welcome in cinema by the ’50s (and in literature several hundred years earlier). Inexperienced filmmakers will fall back on this overused structure thinking it gives their films psychological depth. It doesn’t.
The Descent proves Marshall knows how to scare an audience, but it also shows that he can’t yet distinguish the clever from the clichéd. I can always hope for another re-edit when it hits DVD shelves.