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Synopsis: A year after a horrifying car accident kills her husband and daughter, Sarah heads out on an adventure holiday with five of her friends. Their destination is a cave in the Appalachians. Sarah is still troubled by dreams about the accident, and once the descent into the cave begins, she begins to hear things here companions cannot. Things don't go so well for the women after they wriggle into a narrow passage that collapses behind them. One of their party suffers a devastating injury. They stumble upon a cave drawing and old equipment that suggests that there is another exit to the cave--a cave that turns out to be unmapped, but by then tempers are flaring. Sarah discovers that her friend, Juno, the ablest athlete in the party, was having an afair with her husband before he died. And it seems that something...else...is in the cave with them....

Conflicting sympathies: One of the oddities in the global film industry, with its artificial trade barriers between competing national film industries, is that films made outside of one market--as The Descent was made outside the North American market--can build up a big head of steam before they ever play in other markets. This film, the second from director Neil Marshall, attracted quite a buzz when it was released in Europe. The film's American distributor held it out of distribution for a year to avoid competing with the similar domestic thriller, The Cave. They needn't have worried. The Cave is already forgotten, but this film is going to be debated for years to come. I saw the film a couple of weeks ago, but I've refrained from writing about it because I haven't been able to decide what to make of it. This is a difficult film to reconcile with my critical sensibilities because it tugs me in two different directions.

On the one hand: it's scary. Damned scary. I'm talking pulse pounding, sweaty-palmed, suffocating fear. This movie taps those emotions and instills them in a receptive audience more effectively than any film I can think of in many a long year. Anyone who has ever crawled through a cave will find their skin crawling at the situations that set up the movie. It caters to every spelunker's worst nightmares, born of claustrophobia and isolation from even a hope of help. There's a particularly nasty injury in this movie, too, one that casts the film in the mode of Touching the Void rather than, say, The Hills Have Eyes.

On the other hand, all of this stands in contrast with the "horror movie" scares the movie tries to impart. Marshall is aware of his tradition and he wallows in it, providing stock jump scares and stock monsters that break the spell the movie has so carefully constructed. While I can excuse Marshall for the revised ending--a cliche if ever there was one, but the fault of idiot American executives--he has to shoulder the blame for much else, including the appalling number of jump scares in the film (most egregiously: the dream sequence at the cabin, which is a more appalling cheap shot than the tacked on ending--if you get the feeling that I don't like jump scares, you would be right). He must also shoulder the blame for the underdeveloped supporting characters: only Sarah and Juno have anything approaching development, the rest are Star Trek red shirts. He must also shoulder the blame for the flash-cut editing in the last act, which scrambles the action so badly that one is never really sure what is happening. Finally, he includes an "is the villain really dead" moment when Juno jumps into the water near the end and there's a floating crawler who has been wounded previously. These kinds of moments fall into the category of shopworn cliches, and they're all disappointing flaws that drag down the movie..

The monsters in particular give me pause. Our first glimpse of one of them in a flashlight beam is a terrific moment, but as we discover more about them, their rationale crumbles beneath them: if they can and do leave the cave to hunt, then why are they blind pale things? It is implied at several points that the crawlers leave the cave. At the outset, the movie presents us with a deer that's been savaged by something. This foreshadows the beasties in the cave. More importantly, in the bone pit where the crawlers take their victims, we clearly see skulls with antlers. Deer and moose don't usually enter caves, especially not a pit cave like the one in the movie. The only way these skeletons could find their way into the cave is if the crawlers bring them in from the outside. If this is the case, there is no evolutionary reason for their limitations. Pesky logic.

In any avent, given the overall construction of the movie, I don't think the filmmakers themselves know how they managed the undeniable terror the film elicits. This film stands as a rebuke to many film theorists; it is evidence that art, whatever THAT means, is sometimes the product of blind luck and accident rather than any intentional act of the artst.

Mind you, the film isn't badly made. Far from it. Marshall has made the most of his limited resources. His cavern sets are convincing and the design of the film is superb. He's avoided many of the pitfalls awaiting low budget filmmakers by filming around the production's shortcomings. That the film is mostly set in the dark helps this immeasurably. It's also a relief to find a horror movie that has more to offer an audience than the sadistic thrills of the elaborate torture scenarios staged by game-playing serial killers. This film touches primal nerves centers that those kinds of films aren't even aware exist.

Ultimately, this comes down to the critical yardsticks one is inclined to use. I've maintained for years that the only measure of a good comedy is whether or not it's funny. By extension, the critical measure of a horror movie should then be "is it scary?" The Descent succeeds admirably on this count, but I can't help but wish that the movie--AS a movie--were better than it is. Ah, well.

8/30/2006