"The Descent"... Into My Real, Actual Nightmares...

On a scale from 1-to-10, how much do you enjoy watching car accidents? That's a serious question. Granted, I'll plead The Fifth on that one, so as to avoid ending up on any sort of watchlist. There's something inherently human in not being able to look away from a horrible car accident. Sorry, collision. As Simon Pegg famously said in Hot Fuzz (2007): “Because ‘accident’ implies there's nobody to blame."

There's a German word for that. Yeah, it's called “schadenfreude” which means “taking pleasure out of the pain or misfortune of others”. Nobody's perfect. We're all flawed. Whatever trite phrase works. I'll say it, so you don't have to-- watching someone get totally pancaked by a two-tonne MACK truck is awful for sure, but at least it's not happening to you, right?

Now, is watching a very real collision via dash-cam footage or even up close and personal IRL likely to cause some very real PTSD? It's certainly possible. What Jaws (1975) did for lakes-- and Psycho (1960) did for showers, Final Destination 2 (2003) certainly scarred an entire generation of millennials into never-ever driving behind a log truck on an open highway. No matter what. That “scene” (if you know, you know) was-- and still is so deeply imprinted into my brain. All the way down through to my very cerebral cortex.

So much so, that like a Pavlovian dog out of sheer tensive habit, I would routinely avoid log trucks even in video-game form. I'm not even kidding. I'd avoid them bubonically, while even putting digital pedal to the digital metal, in the midst of the most heart-pounding and white-hot of Need For Speed pursuits. While there have certainly been many car crashes in films over the years, none have come close to the lasting impact of comically-large logs from comically-large log trucks making people utterly explode into pink mist and viscera. That is until one English director threw his own proverbial gauntlet down, if he had to say anything about it. And he sure did.

Neil Marshall is an underrated genius. Dog Soldiers (2002) is a brilliant feature film directorial debut. Doomsday (2008), Centurion (2010) and (yes) even, Hellboy (2019) are all underrated in my opinion. Don't @ me. It's his mid-aughts utterly nerve-shredding horror flick though, from ‘05, that is easily his best work. That’s also my personal favourite. The cold open of The Descent (2005) lives rent-free in my head. Nothing will raise my blood pressure more than any moment where a character whilst driving, briefly takes their eyes off the road. Even for a moment. This is a PSA. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Yeah-- that. Please stop doing-- that.

If Batman Begins (2005) taught me at 12-years-old what the term “spelunking” meant in the first place, then The Descent showed me that in action to an even more extensive degree.The Descent succeeds, where many of its other horrific ilk-- fall fully flat on their face. All boiled down in essence to one very simple fact: It's a horror film that's actually scary. Like really, really scary. The opening car crash scene alone is equal parts bloody, gruesome, and shocking. While also rather expertly and simultaneously being both explicit and implicit. That's a hard thing to do, but Marshall makes it look like child's play. And that's just the first five minutes.

Imagine experience a horrific life-altering trauma, then going back and cave-diving a year later with the same group of friends that unintentionally remind you of said trauma… following so far? Only to nearly die multiple times in a cave that supposedly no one's ever been to before, without a map and no way of Search and Rescue being able to globally position you for a last minute angel-saving-flight. Lest we forget about the multiple side-servings of claustrophobia, nyctophobia, achrophobia, xenophobia and whatever the fear of “cannibalistic miners having long adapted to the dark and subsequently turned themselves into nightmarish R-rated vampire-bat-like cousins of Gollum that are hungry for you and the juicy flesh of your five exploratory friends.”

Credit must go to the Simon Bowles, the production designer of the film, as all of the stuff inside the cave(s) was built as a set on a sound-stage. Although, you'd never know it, as it genuinely looks like the film crew went deep into the very depths of Hell to capture the absolute horror on location. Mix with that, the top-notch excellent lighting, and you've got yourself a real killer horror film combo. The film is lit primarily with in-world lighting, via headlamps (your latest horrible spelunking expedition brought to you by PETZL), flares and infrared cameras, etc…

Not only is the film scary, but its six central women are all distinct in their own characters and voices. You actually like these characters. You actually want them to succeed. You actually care about what happens to them. What a radical concept for a horror film, right? While Alex Reid (Beth), Saskia Mulder (Rebecca), Nora-Jane Noone (Holly), and MyAnna Buring (Sam) all deliver tough, muscular and committed performances-- it's the film's two leading ladies that really knock it out of the park all the way home.

Shauna Macdonald as Sarah has so much intense heavy-lifting to do here, as the film's emotional anchor-point and terribly traumatized protagonist. They all get put through the proverbial ringer, but there's some particularly haunting moments that happen to Sarah specifically, which can and will stick with you. There's a reason she's (while utterly drenched in blood, and who-knows-what-else) used as the primary source for the film's completely successful and utterly disturbing marketing campaign. Great job, marketing!

A protagonist, however, is only as good as their antagonist. Natalie Mendoza gives an utterly go-for-broke and fearless performance here as Juno. By every metric the audience has every right “to hate” Juno. And yet, you can't not care for her too. The film smartly never condemns Juno, even if other characters in the film do, and debatably, deservedly so. You understand who she is, and what she does, even if you yourself may not agree with her choices. Flawed characters are always more interesting. Juno is utterly wracked with guilt. Mendoza kills it.

To a larger point, that's the beauty of the film. As an audience, you understand completely why the characters make the choices they do. You understand completely why certain key pieces of info are withheld from certain characters in the moments that they are withheld. Even if some character choices are technically “frustrating”, it makes total sense as to why those choices are made. And that's a very key distinction. Most other horror movies have characters make stupid choices and it makes you wanna scream. Characters in The Descent make “bad choices,” but all it does is make your body tense up in dreaded apprehension. And that's the point.I'd also be utterly remiss if I neglected to mention the powerful score for the film. David Julyan's score is many things. Many things that words can barely describe. At the risk of sounding totally trite and/or unintentionaly disingenuous, the score is beautiful, epic, haunting, heartbreaking and will make even the most tough-as-nails audience member positively goose-fleshed from stem to stern. His titular song which shares its name with the film itself plays in the very heart of the climax. Simply put, it's an absolute banger. Everything coalesces in those final few moments, and the score… just absolutely takes it home.

At 99-minutes in length, The Descent (2005) is a lean, mean survival-slasher with fun characters, gnarly blood and gore, excellent visuals, great direction, tense music, and solid performances all across the board. The Unrated Director's Cut has an even better, more brutal and nihilistic ending. I get why they changed it for the US release of the film, however I wish they hadn't. The US ending isn't bad at all per se. It's just the fact that the Unrated Ending even exists, makes the Theatrical Ending, well pale… in comparison. There's some kinda “pale-miner-vampire-bat-people-monsters-joke” in there… somewhere.

And no-- don't even get me started on the film's utterly inept, highly unnecessary, and completely pointless, cash-grab sequel, The Descent - Part II (2009), that most definitely doesn't exist. There is only one cave-diving, trauma-causing, claustrophobic “girl's-trip” horror flick, and it came out in 2005. Brought to you by PETZL.