Neil Marshall took three years to make another film after his impressive debut, Dog Soldiers. Unfortunately, as one critic noted, it seems as if it was ill-spent time in that the director merely revamped his first production, having shifted the gender of his cast from male to female atop opting for a change in locale, as the scenario and threat remains constant, resulting what could easily be argued to be the bastard child of John Boorman’s Deliverance.
Six females reunite a year after Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) loses her husband, Paul (Oliver Milburn), and daughter, Jessica (Molly Kayll), in an automobile accident. All the women being extreme sports fanatics, they opt to drive to Chattanooga National Park in order to go spelunking in the North Carolina segment of the Appalachians. However, things awry after Juno (Natalie Mendoza) reveals she intentionally led her friends into an uncharted cave–whose entry point just collapsed–in hopes of conquering and thereby placing her name to it before the collective discovers that they are being hunted by subterranean creatures.
The first impression one receives when watching The Descent is an air of feminism that seems to pervade the production. However, once examined, Juno–a send off of Ridley Scott’s feminist icon Ripley, an ensemble cast dominated by females (the only male character granted a name is killed in the first scene), and an homage to Brian De Palma’s Carrie, if one pauses to consider, the director never develops said motif enough to justify formally citing it as such. Furthermore–and here’s the rub–is that Marshall’s inclusion of another motif, that of humanity’s inhumanity toward itself, negates his gender-oriented agenda.
Many renowned horror directors, most notably James Whale and George Romero, have presented the theme of self-inflicted human antagonism as the primary villain in lieu of a monster stalking those involved. However, any horror director attempting to rise above mere escapism knows and has utilized this form of social criticism, so much so that it has become old hat in many respects. Paradoxically, by housing such a theme alongside a feminist tract, the two motifs subsequently counteract one another. What’s more, Marshall even attempts to blur the line between the cave creatures, credited as “crawlers,” and his protagonists as we watch as one character ambles, simian-like much like his self-described antagonists, up an include at the end of the feature.
It seems as if Marshall was aware that he didn’t have the script that perhaps he’d believed he had after shooting had begun in that, sadly, his film resorts to numerous, trite “boo” moments which serve no purpose outside of the momentary shock. He also degrades his audience by presenting a character who is maimed to such a degree that if we were to undergo such a mutilation as mere mortals, we would be deader than a doornail. However, after lying comatose for approximately twenty minutes as crawlers and friends alike walk over her, the left-for-dead rises up one last time in order to issue information–in Deus Ex Machina style nonetheless–to one of her companions. Atop the stereotypical nature of such a scene is the fact that the news which is being reported is explicitly known by the audience and has been intuitively garnered by the individual who is receiving the input. What’s left is a sequence which can only be written off as filler in order to reach a designated running time.
Likewise, approximately fifteen minutes are devoted to Sarah’s back story. Yes, as one character notes, the setting houses the potential to induce hallucinations, claustrophobia, paranoia, and the like, but Marshall could have easily presented Sarah’s mental instability more succinctly without spending so much time on a subplot which doesn’t justify its minimal effects. Furthermore, even though the film’s closing scene involves a plot twist based around her psychological fallibility, it comes across as a trick pony which all but admits that the director is desperately attempting to breathe life into an otherwise flaccid narrative at the last moment. As I left the theater, I couldn’t help but think that, considering Marshall’s agenda, he could have achieved greater effect if he would have permitted his aforementioned mental alignments to establish themselves more thoroughly and presented the remainder of the film from the deteriorating characters’ subjective POVs in a surreal manner akin to Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder, thus offsetting his viewer’s equilibrium and thereby lending to the sense of terror.
What’s most disappointing about The Descent is Marshall’s visual depiction of his crawlers, which anyone with a history in cinema will recognize as mirror images of one of the most famous horror antagonists of all time. The sin lies in that the effigetic nature of his creatures lends nothing to their paterfamilias but instead comes across as a lethargic excuse to house one of the director’s favorite characters of yesteryear.
Neil Marshall’s The Descent only serves a purpose for genre fanboys looking for horrific eye candy (sorry, no nudity), replete with a handful of eye gougings which would make Lucio Fulci shirk. Though it displayed earnest efforts at times, such as Marshall assigning a color scheme and various visual aides–a video camera, one a flashlight, another a flare, and so on–to his characters in which to make them more readily identifiable to his audience atop a beautifully cinematographed scene at the climax, his fight scenes–which are so poorly choreographed that one has to wait until their resolution to see who is left standing in order to assess what occurred–and pathetic excuses for CGI bats which flutter throughout the cave, serve as representatives of the film as a whole. On that note, hopefully The Descent is a mere instance of the sophomore slump for the director and that he’ll align himself, once again, with the power that was Dog Soldiers during his next outing.
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
