البـــــوابـــة
Thursday, May 13, 2010
The
Descent
Bleak, creepy and, once its true horror
premise is belatedly revealed after a lengthy and patient build-up,
absolutely brutal, The Descent is as good as minimal,
no-frills horror gets. A group of friends, all young women, meet up for
yearly adventures in order to bond despite being spread out across the
world, dealing with individual lives and individual tragedies. Their
latest trip together is a descent into an unexplored cave system,
spelunking and crawling through the tight tunnels. The structure's
strictly traditional: some set-up, in which the women's chatter and
banter at their staging cabin introduces their relationships and
personalities, and then it's off into the caves, where the
claustrophobia quickly becomes unbearable. The darkness, the
constriction, is intense, and these women, crawling through the caves,
often crawl right up to the camera, the lights on their heads creating
blinding flashes within the darkness. The frame becomes a series of
holes, small irregular patches of light chopped out of the blackness
that otherwise surrounds the explorers everywhere. It's nearly
overwhelming in the way it forces the audience to feel what the
characters feel, to be trapped and lost along with them.
And
that's all before, after all this build-up towards a claustrophobic but
rather conventional story of being lost and trapped in the dark, all
hell breaks loose and things start to get really ugly. Director Neil
Marshall is excellent at showing just enough to suggest the
horror happening in the dark, without actually showing more than a brief
burst of motion here, a geyser of blood there, a frenzied struggle
thrashing around in the dark. The editing is brisk and occasionally
confusing in its rapid pacing and dizzying shifts in perspective, but
there's no denying that Marshall still locates numerous striking,
horrifying images within this darkness and confusion, honing in on the
bracing moments of anguish and devastation that are splattered
throughout the film. It's a visceral film, all about capturing the
in-your-face sensations of being surrounded by darkness, hemmed in on
all sides and assaulted by mutated monsters intent on devouring any soft
flesh that gets in their way.
Before this, though, there's an
introduction in which the trauma that will linger over the rest of the
film is introduced. In one brief moment, Sarah (Shauna MacDonald) loses
both her husband and her daughter and, in a subtle exchange of glances
and gestures that she misses but that isn't lost on the audience,
Marshall also establishes the unspoken origin of a slow-burning tension
that develops between Sarah and her best friend Juno (Natalie Mendoza)
and will eventually boil over completely at the harrowing climax. The
storytelling is simple, even simplistic, but that's all that's required
here: Marshall sets up, very quickly and economically, the minimal
conflicts that will serve as a subtextual counterpoint to the more
physical horror that explodes in the film's second half.
The rest of the women — Beth (Alex Reid),
Rebecca (Saskia Mulder), Sam (MyAnna Buring), Holly (Nora-Jane Noone) —
are clustered around this central trauma, creating a realistic group of
friends with a naturalistic sense of camaraderie. They mock each other
in the way real friends do, goofing around, chatting amiably with
rapid-fire patter; one recalls the banter of the women in Quentin
Tarantino's Death Proof, albeit without the reflexive cultural
namedropping. The film is raw and stripped-down, eventually sending
these cheerful, confident women through the grinder. Marshall captures
certain powerful images that appear as though glimpsed in passing in the
flickering flame of torchlight: a lake of blood from which the heroine
emerges glistening and wet, with little nuggets of gristle and bone
scattered along her forearms; the little bubbles of blood that spurt out
when a blade cuts into flesh; a white, animalistic naked body caught
for a second in the glow of a lamp, like an animal frozen in the
headlights; the women's frightened faces clustered together in the green
haze of a light; a twisted closeup of a mole-like mutant's snarling
face, ooze dripping down its rubbery chin.
Once the monsters are
introduced, the claustrophobic terror of crawling through tight spaces,
being constricted on all sides, is replaced by the bloody, harsh
violence of the women's fight against these creatures. They're separated
from one another and forced to fend off the monsters' attacks, and as
the formula dictates in a movie like this, attrition begins wearing away
at the group, quickly dwindling their numbers. It's obvious from the
start who the last two standing have to be, the two friends opposed
against each other in subtle ways, their friendship strained by the
shared trauma of the opening scenes and the subsequent events. The last
two women alive become gritty action heroes, wading through blood, armed
with blades that they'd once used for climbing and that they now plunge
ferociously into the warped bodies of their attackers. Marshall's
direction becomes frenzied and over-the-top, depicting the women with
their faces and bodies smeared with blood, striking melodramatic action
poses as they fight off waves of the monsters. In many ways, it's a
jarring disconnect in tone and verisimilitude, a startling left turn
from the first half's naturalistic depiction of underground
claustrophobia and fear. These are ordinary women, if especially
athletic and adventurous ones, and one of them makes a point, early on,
of saying that she's not Tomb Raider — which makes the film's late
transformation into an action movie adventure not entirely convincing.
Which
isn't to say that it isn't peculiarly satisfying regardless. The film's
bloody, gory denouement is, despite its out-of-nowhere action movie
trappings and jittery editing, a rather exhilarating and horrifying
ride. The metaphorical emotional and moral descent that Marshall
doubtless intends as a parallel to the physical, literal descent, is
never handled as well or developed as fully as the director probably
intends, but even that hardly matters. The film's aims and successes are
relatively modest, but within its area it excels: it is a movie that
shocks the senses and provokes a profound sympathy for its generic
characters, who one by one are consumed by this giant hole in the ground
and its monstrous denizens.
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