The Descent (2005)
The Descent
(2005)
Horror
fiction has always been a male-dominated form, both among creators and content.
Never-the-less, making female characters the central players in Horror fiction isn’t
new. The “Woman in Peril” sub-Genre not only older than cinema, but even older
than the time that Critics and Marketers started creating clear Genre
categories for fiction, good examples are Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane
Eyre” and her sister Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” (both first published in
1847).
Still,
commonly presenting stronger female protagonists would take some time, the
first hints of the coming revolution would appear, surprisingly, in one of the
first Slasher films, “Black Christmas” (1974). Other Slasher’s mostly displayed
loathsome misogyny so bluntly that it began to annoy even male Horror creators,
and they pushed back. That, most likely, would make the most important landmark
“Alien” (1979).
The
‘70s was the Feminist Era, and the concerns it put into cinema are still
relevant, but it is hard to image anyone then attempting something like “The
Decsent” back then. In some ways, it’s very familiar, a small group of people
trapped in a claustrophobic environment, stalked by Monsters (so, like “Alien”)
but to have all the characters female, and athletes too boot, seems a hard-sell
anytime during the 20th c; yet so early into the 21st, it
barely raised an eyelash.
Oh,
the times, they are a changing.
This
is the second-feature by Writer/Director Neil Marshall, first being the hugely
entertaining Werewolf movie "Dog Soldiers"(2002) which was
male-focused. In both, he displays a love of conveying a hostile environment as
being as potent a source of Fear as the fantastical Monster. This, like “Dog
Soldiers,” is a film about the fight for survival, so character motivation is
pretty clear, but this is also about female power-politics, and the lack of
male characters only heightens that theme. I should say that it doesn’t forget
to play to its largely-male audience, because all the women are super-fit, with
tightish clothing, and bathed with sweat, but we can’t really call that
exploitive, because all is legitimately befitting what the women are actually
trying to do, spelunking. All the women are quite beautiful too, at
least until, later in the film, they are smeared head-to-toe in mud and blood.
Nicely described by Roger Ebert, “Bodies are pushed, pulled, battered and
stretched to the breaking point and beyond … These women are straining the
limits of their muscles and bones, their friendships, and their core beliefs
about who they are.”
Our central character is Sarah Carter (Shauna Macdonald), a lover of extreme sports, and opens
with her enjoying an exhilarating, injury-less, all-female, white-water rafting
trip. Immediately after she, her husband Paul (Oliver Milburn) and their daughter Jessica (Molly Kayll), are involved in
a terrible car accident. Sarah survives, but her family does not.
Flash-forward one year.
Still traumatized, Sarah is talked into a spelunking
adventure with, again, an all-female group. Pushing hardest for Sarah to
re-engage in the sports she loves is her long-time friend Juno Kaplan (Natalie Mendoza). Also present is another long-time
friend, Elizabeth "Beth" O'Brien (Alex
Reid) and a few new
women, Samantha "Sam" Vernet (MyAnna
Buring), her daughter Rebecca
Vernet (Saskia Mulder), and the less-experienced Holly
Mills (Nora-Jane Noone).
With a main cast of six, the film does provide itself with
adequate Monster Meat for its 100-minute running time, but it should also be
credited for the quality of its thumbnail-characterizations; we believe them
all when they are introduced, so we care about them when their lives are in
danger. That being said, only Sarah and Juno are fully developed (both leads,
MacDonald and Mendoza, are excellent, but I must say that in a secondary role,
Reid as Beth deserves special notice, as her performance is more impressive
than her writing). Though the focus is on Sarah, Juno compels more as she’s
revealed as a sort-of Villainess. Though the Monster threat is nothing Juno can
be blamed for, this group that is supposed to be guided by consensus, yet is
constantly driven by Juno’s manipulations, and before the film is over, she’s
exposed as having more hidden agendas than Mrs. Danvers (the more explicit Villainess
of that great Woman in Peril novel “Rebecca” by Daphne du Maurier, first published in 1938).
It is set in
the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, but actually filmed in Scotland and on really well designed
sets in Pinewood Studios, England, with an all-British cast whose USA accents
are flawless. The film takes its own sweet time in getting the women into the
cave, and longer still to introduce the Monsters, which prove to be a
human-sub-species that seem to have been waiting quite a long time for such a
tasty lunch to be delivered. As it is semi-relaxed early-on, it plays like a
slow-burner that it proves not to be, with its creepiness really coming alive
once the women get into the dark. The film is gory, but the fear is really all
about what you can’t see, and Cinematographer
Sam McCurdy has enormous fun with light and color -- white beams of flashlights
and headlamps, the green and red from glow-sticks and flares, alternately
revealing everything, or nothing at all.
Growing up on “Star Trek” (TV series first
aired in 1966) fake-looking paper-mâché caves are much a part of my childhood.
I’ve also seen many a film that tried to combine real caverns with fake ones
badly. Here, the caves, all or mostly fake, are completely realistic, and as
the women struggle through passages that seem too tight for their bodies and negotiate
stalactites that look like carnivore teeth, the perfection of the illusion of
the sets proves essential to the fear (Production Design by Simon Bowles, Scenic Sculptor Nigel Keen)
This film is Survival Horror, a term mostly
applied to video games, and which generally implies a vicious version of Social
Darwinism. The film avoids that trap by allowing room form the captiousness of
Fate, these women came prepared, and the encounter with the Fantastic is reason-defying.
Yes, it does allow the strong more chances for survival, but co-operation proves
more important than strength and underlines that the essential element of
co-operation is trust. When trust is violated, by accident or by selfish will,
no one wins.
The film has two endings, European and USA. I
was lucky to see the European version first, and it’s heartbreakingly sad. The
USA Distributors insisted on an alternate believing that the weak-hearted
audiences in my nation couldn’t bare the original’s "uber-hopeless
finale."
For the record, the
alternate isn’t really more positive, it’s just plain lame.
Done on a modest budget (calculating pound v dollar from 15
years ago is complicated, but way less than $5 million). It was unhappy to be
competing with a big-budget movie with a near-identical premise, “The Cave”
($30 million) which began production a full six months earlier. This
fast-tracked everything, especially rushing post-production to get into the
theaters first. This rushing didn’t create shabby work, so someone should give
Editor Jon Harris a lollipop.
Once released, a new problem emerged, because it was in the
middle of the reaction to the July
2005 London Bombings by Jihadist Terrorists, and that hurt ticket sales. Still,
the film proved enormously successful, and ultimately, the critical and audience
consensus was “The Descent” rocked, and “The Cave” sucked.
These days, all successful Horror films get a sequel, even
this one, that seemed to allow no room for that. “The Descent 2” (2009) is a
movie I’m consciously avoiding, and I hope you do too.
Trailer:
The Descent (2005) Official
Trailer #1 - Horror Movie HD - YouTube
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