DVD: The Descent

While waiting for the fourth disk of season 4 of House to arrive, I watched The Descent. This movie has been out on DVD for a while, so why bring it up now?

Because I think I might become a fan of its writer-director, Neil Marshall. His latest is Doomsday, recently released on DVD, and while it’s sort of a mess, it’s a mess in that oh-fun-what-the-heck-let’s-shoot-a-Bentley-through-a-bus sort of way.

The Descent is a different sort of animal. Prepare for spoilers. Since this film has been out for a while, I’m going to feel free to reveal.

The setup is simple: Six friends go spelunking, complications ensue. Basic complications involve Sarah and Juno. Sarah is an emotional wreck following the rather horrible and tragic deaths of her husband and daughter (this trip is seen as therapy, oh my). Juno is a reckless thrill-seeker who leads an unknowing Sarah and friends into a cave no one has – publicly, at least – ever explored. All goes horribly wrong, of course, leaving the six in the dark, desperately seeking a way out.

By this point, I was on the edge of my couch, creeped out. Think of the opening scene of Cliffhanger, with Stallone trying – and failing – to rescue his best friend’s fiancé from her doom. The rest of Cliffhanger couldn’t live up to that opening tension; The Descent manages to stretch things out a bit more.

All of the characters are serviceable, if a trifle cliché. There’s the reckless one with a tinge of guilty conscience, the oh-so-helpful one worrying about her sister, the wildly reckless one who thinks they’re all pansies, and, of course, our emotionally burnt out one, trying to recover from a horrific loss. There’s another in there somewhere, but I suppose she was little more than a red shirt.

Then again, they’re all red shirts. The film’s basic formula is: Who gets out alive? It changes to become: Does anyone get out alive?

The film falls apart when it opts to transform from a psychological thriller to an outright horror film. There are critters down there in the dark, chittering to themselves. They hunt and pursue our six heroines and one by one our spelunkers become tasty snacks.

Once the creatures enter the picture, the film stumbles and goes brain dead. You get lots of screaming, panic, blood, screaming, blood, running, blood, scattering, blood, intestines, a lot of squish, a small lake of blood (I am not kidding), heavy breathing in the dark, repeat; i.e., now-standard horror-movie fare.

Which is one hell of a disappointment because until then I was, as said, on the edge of my seat. Maybe it’s latent claustrophobia, but those sequences where they’re squirming through tight passages, or even when they’re in massive underground caverns, were unnerving. The way the group began as one big happy family of friends and slowly, as their predicament became clear, started to unravel was well done. Maybe not perfect, maybe a little too easy, but it worked for me.

The creatures, on the other hand, didn’t. Sure, due to living in complete darkness their eyes have atrophied. Get it. Blind, they hunt by sound. Fine. But they can’t hear one of our heroines when they’re standing on her?

I understand why the creatures have to hunt outside the cave because if they were sealed in underground, Marshall would have had to spend time establishing the creatures’ food supply. As a bonus, he gives our trapped heroines – and the audience – the illusion that there’s a way to escape. Well, given the sort of prey the beasties drag down into the dark (can you say, “moose”?), that escape route should have been easy to find.

But that’s almost a side issue because the big problem I had with the creatures is that they detract from the psychological drama that was developing. There are secrets between our sisters with different mothers, especially between Sarah and Juno. Watching the group descend into despair and madness while that hidden truth comes out would have been awesome. Melodramatic, yeah, but awesome nonetheless.

There didn’t have to be creatures. Sarah could have been convinced there’s something in the cave with them. Her mind’s already a weak and fragile thing, remember, and now she’s off her meds. As she unravels her fear, in the close darkness, infects the others. Panic causes injuries, death. Their situation, never hopeful, goes straight to hell.

Oh, it could have been so. The theatrical release of the film allowed Sarah to be the sole survivor. The closing moment is her sitting in a car, sobbing, and suddenly seeing one of her dead companions sitting next to her. Scream, pop to black, roll credits.

In the “director’s cut” you get a different ending. Sarah screams and suddenly she’s looking at her daughter, lit by the glow of birthday cake candles (a vision that has recurred throughout the film, so this is nicely foreshadowed). The camera pulls back to show Sarah just before she escaped from the cave. Eyes wide, almost smiling, lit by unseen candles. The camera continues to pull back and we see she’s lit by the torch she made, kneeling on a slope of bones in the cave, staring at nothing. She’s in the cave, catatonic. Her descent into madness is complete. Her madness only lets her see her daughter, the birthday cake, and the candles. All else is darkness. Roll credits. It’s up to us to debate whether she’s escaped and is unaware of that fact, or is still in the cave and is unaware of that reality.

Creepy.

The film is better without those stupid creatures. Without them, The Descent lives up to its title. It’s less about a descent into the bowels of the earth and more about a descent into madness. Nice, creepy stuff.

At some point, Marshall's writing ability will improve. He’ll gain the confidence to follow through on how his films start. No shortcuts, no easy escapes.

And then he’ll truly scare the crap out of us.