The Descent (2005) – Review

After firmly installing himself on everyone’s radar with his massively fun debut, the horror comedy Dog Soliders, everyone huddled round waiting to see what British director Neil Marshall was going to unleash upon us next. However, compared to the jocular stylings of his werewolf versus squaddies calling card, The Descent was a whole other creature entirely as he took his gritty tone and love of monsters underground to produce arguably one of the best horror films of the entire decade.
Merciless, brutal and downright scary, Marshall’s sophomore effort took survival horror to impressive depths and weaved genuine drama, inspired jump scares, graphic gore and a legitimate, phobia inducing set up to deliver a nihilistic masterpiece that, to this day, still doesn’t get half the recognition it should.

A year after her husband and young child were killed in a gruesome car accident, a still grieving Sarah is persuaded by her thrill-seeker friends to join them in a trip to a remote cabin in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina for a spleunking adventure weekend and desperate to reunite with her social group she agrees. The rest of the group, that includes the loyal Beth, alpha-female Juno, headstrong newcomer Holly and the pair of Sam and Rebecca are glad to have her and spend the night getting wasted as only friends can do. However, when the sun comes up and the hangovers are at their full ebbs, the women head to the caves they’re about to explore and get stuck in; however, after a bout of the usual crawling, climbing and scrambling, things start to go wrong – like, catastrophically wrong.
After a freak cave in nearly kills Sarah and seals the friends off from the surface, a rather sheepish Juno reveals that they’re not even in the caves they’re supposed to be exploring but are, in fact, in an entirely different set of caverns that no one has ever explored or mapped or even heard of before – needless to say, the tension builds in the group like an over boiled kettle as personal grudges bubbles to the surface. Worse yet, the weird shadows and figures Sarah has been seeing scuttling around in the shadows turn out not to be stress-induced hallucinations, but are a very real, cannibalistic throwbacks who have evolved to hunt in complete darkness and who descend upon the women with ripping teeth and bestial ferocity.
With no way of knowing if there’s even a way out, the women are forced to fight for their lives in a world illuminated solely by flash lights, glow sticks or a makeshift torch, but as their number steadily drops, a terrible accident causes long-gestating resentments to finally explode at the worst possible  moment. Someone’s going down.

There’s so many superlatives I could throw at The Descent I could probably fill a subterranean cave with them, but of all the plus points to choose from, surely the most accomplish is just how fucking scary the thing is. The secret behind this isn’t just because Marshall expertly stages numerous moments where the “Crawlers” suddenly scare the living shit out of you (the camcorder scare is a jolt for the fucking ages), but instead that The Descent would be an utterly devastating experience even before a bunch of Gollum-y, bat-faced motherfuckers showed up. The Descent works chiefly because Marshall takes his remote, God-forsaken, light-starved location and works the crap out of it, ruthlessly wringing even scrap of claustrophobia and isolation he can out of every single moment. The scene where Shauna Macdonald’s long suffering Sarah gets stuck in a passage so narrow, a bulimic fashion model would have issue squeezing through will have you hyperventilating and sweating for real even if you was to watch it on a regular sized tablet.
Another gargantuan plus point is the all-female cast who act like a reverse version of John Carpenter’s The Thing as the internal issues caused by a group comprised entirely of the same sex wouldn’t be anywhere near as intense if it was a mixture of genders. Yes, it could be argued that Saskia Mulder’s Rebecca and MyAnna Buring’s Sam don’t add quite as much to the group other than hysteria and poorly timed watch alarms, but the tension that builds between Sarah, Alex Reid’s well meaning go-between, Beth and Natalie Mendoza’s arrogant Juno could have sustained the stressful dynamic without the need to become a gore-streaked creature feature.

However, become a gore-streaked creature feature it does and yet despite coming straight from a comedy werewolf movie, The Descent impressively refuses to lapse into jokey, Sam Raimi camp and instead chooses to keep things as serious as a Tommy Lee Jones’ passport photo as it piles on shocks, scares and twists that ultimately leaves you as emotionally empty as a freshly hollowed out pumpkin.
The aptly named Crawlers (as they were named on-set) probably would have been some sanitized, over designed, possibly CGI, creation if it were an American film (much like in The Cave, the rival underground monster movie released the same year), but here they are terrifyingly human. Looking like the mottled, sickly cross between Nosferatu and an emaciated crack addict, these diseased looking, primitive humanoids perfectly straddle that line between weirdly feasible and utterly monstrous and thus prove to be a fitting threat. Their so repellant, they prove to be a satisfying beastie to watch die too, as they prove to be gruesomely susceptible to climbing axes and discarded antlers as the survivors gradually shift from terrified victims to crazed, subterranean warrior women before the brutal, third act twist brings everything memorably crashing down.
Marshall has a habit of wearing his influences on his sleeve, and while The Descent is no different, he manages to mold some recognizable imagery into something that feel entirely his own and thus utterly original. The unforgettable sight of Sarah emerging, as if reborn, from a Crawler cess pool like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now only to bellow like a viking warrior while rasing a torch over her head is pure Arnold Schwarzenegger from Predator. Similarly there’s hints and borrows from things like An American Werewolf In London and (of couse) Aliens everywhere, and yet the film never once feels like its telegraphing its influences.

Tence, brutal and sporting an ending as crushingly down beat as anything you’ll see (for the love of God, do not watch the American verson that ends with a tacky jump scare), The Descent is a lean, mean – but thoughtful – scaring machine that plants its doomed cast much deeper than your average six feet under.

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