The Descent

Reviewed by Rich Drees

     One year after her husband and young daughter were killed in a car accident, Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) joins five friends for a caving expedition in North Carolina’s Appalachian Mountains. Deep underground in an unmapped cave system, a minor rockslide blocks the group’s way back to the surface, forcing them to continue forward in the hopes of finding a way out. As their journey continues, the group’s stress levels rise resulting in flared tempers and the revelations of long held secrets. But the greatest danger to the group doesn’t lie from within, but from something lurking in he darkness, just out of range of their flashlights.

     Screenwriter/director Neil (Dog Soldiers, 2002) Marshall has described his film as “Deliverance goes underground,” but the film harkens much more to Ridley Scott’s franchise-launching Alien (1979) in that The Descent earns its scares the old fashion way. Marshall touches on some basic, visceral fears – in this case darkness and being buried alive – and then amplifies them through skillful manipulation. Marshall convincingly creates an atmosphere of claustrophobia the affects not only his characters but the audience as well. Once he separates the group, Marshall effectively juggles both plot strands, playing their tensions off of each other. There is no relying on the high concepts that have fueled the recent spate of Japanese horror films and their English language remakes here. This is just well-crafted filmmaking.

     Marshalls also knows the importance in defining his characters so that the audience identifies with them. Each of the six women are given at least some small moments in the film’s opening scenes, letting the audience get to know them and how they interact with their friends. This created empathy allows the film to not just shock the audience with its scares, but to really gut punch the viewer. Marshall allows the group’s dynamic to gradually build and then disintegrate over the film’s first hour, revealing that the "Descent" in the title isn't so much a physical journey for these women, but a psychological one into the depths of their own personal hells. And then finally, when the audience thinks that things can’t get much worse, a final monkey-wrench is thrown into the works that ratchets up the scares even further for an adrenaline-charged dash to the final fade to black.