Film Reviews

The Descent

• Rating:
• Director: Neil Marshall
• Starring: Natalie Jackson Mendoza
• Details: UK / 98 mins (18s).

Six women - go-getting sporty types - descend into a vast cave to explore its nether reaches only to get trapped behind a rock-fall. Worse, the cave is populated by humanoid 'crawlers', vicious beasts who prey on flesh. Will the women's innate ability to bond together prove them superior to the sub-human predators? Will it f**k. The beauty of Neil Marshall's turbo-charged horror is that it exploits the most of common of fears - darkness, claustrophobia, nightmarish creatures - but also explodes every sickly-sweet Hollywood myth about girly-style bonding along the way. The overlong preamble sets up an adventure-weekend take on Fried Green Tomatoes or Magnolia (or a thousand other chick-flicks you might care to mention); it focuses on Sarah (MacDonald), who has lost her husband and young daughter in an accident a year previously. But if Marshall (who writes and directs) intends the cave as a metaphorical womb by which Sarah will achieve a redemptive re-birthing, it's a womb harbouring all things evil, slithery, claustrophobic and violent. Not only do the women battle the hostile environment and the crawlers; as the pressure mounts and cracks appear in their gals-together facade, they also get stuck into one another with no little gusto: Sarah's metamorphosis results not in an all-wise touchy-feely Earth Mother but the bastard offspring of Rambo and Ripley, a marauding, savage and exhilarating incarnation. Sam McCurdy's cinematography ekes out imaginative angles from the confined space, pushing into nooks and crannies to give an eerie sense of what it might feel like to be trapped underground, and quite a few of the traditional 'Boo!' moments are artfully disguised. The script is flawed in places, and some of the acting could have done with a full blackout as opposed to dim and flickering lighting, but for cheeky, full-on horror that playfully mangles horror, action and chick-flick conventions, The Descent is full value for money.

Review by Declan Burke