The Descent

The concept of crawling through tight, winding, unfamiliar tunnels is scary enough. But, of course, this movie moves far beyond that.

This movie has a great setup with a close group of long time friends having fun and reuniting for different outdoor adventures.

From the beginning the directing is great. You really get a sense of adventure and the anxiety/excitement that goes into exploring a cave. It portrays it well and brings home the endeavor that cave exploration is.

The story is engaging as it builds. They run into natural trouble that's bad enough. But then the dire situation becomes far worse.

This movie is genuinely suspenseful. The gore is well done. The characters are sympathetic. The emotion builds to a fever pitch.

There are some shocking elements to the ending.

It is a great movie and there is no way it should be rated anything less than an 8 out of 10.

It really is well done. With relatable characters you can actually care about. It's considered a classic by many for a reason. It's legitimately uncomfortable, suspenseful and scary. And well directed. It's just a great movie.

The Descent is a little Alien, some Predator, and quite an amount of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The story involves a group of cave explorers' journey through a deep cave, two miles underground. They don't necessarily make a great team-they seem unplanned, and we would go on to the third act, and figure out that they lack strategy as well. That is when some of the members become badass heroines, joining the bloodfest in the cave, where the unknown lies await.

Simplistic as it is, The Descent offers an excellent atmosphere and very creative moments. The opening shows a shocking event that becomes a minor plot device. The entire first half is a better adventure film than a horror one; the team's first enemy is the landscape. There are lots of "setup" shots showing items that will inevitably appear later. Writer/Director Neil Marshall has an impressive style, especially for some amazingly lighted claustrophobic scenes.

The thing is, these wonderful 50 minutes set my expectation high, that I found the latter half underwhelming. Fake jumpscares are a prominent element in the movie. There is so much of it that the real ones are less effective. The tone makes a 180-degree shift, changing to a lot of gory fights and killings. They should be thrilling experiences, but the problem is I simply can't see what's going on, because: 1. The scenes are extremely dark, which is realistic but unworkable for fight sequences. 2. The team all have the same gear, look, and voice. I have a hard time distinguishing them. 3. The editing makes a shift as well; the cuts are intensely quick, making my eye sore by looking at it for too long.

But The Descent is a sufficient horror movie, because it is so interestingly constructed, and Marshall has great talents. Watching the characters, the situation and the film itself descend into madness is of great fun.

Regular readers of my comments know I am interested in cinematic architecture.

There's built space of course, but much cooler is when a filmmaker deals with the non-physical: architectural fire or water. Smoke.

And then there's perhaps the hardest of them, architectural darkness. Form of the formless, containment by absence, the pressing in of the absence of light.

"Ghosts of Mars" did a bit of it, poorly, and it is exceedingly rare overall. That's why I celebrate any attempt. This isn't great, but it has some competence and lessons.

If you don't know this little film, it has a long setup period where we have a group of young women — not girls, surely — who arrange to be stranded in a cavern with a threat.

There are monsters but the threat is the dark. This isn't terrific cinematic engineering, that part all seems to be hit and miss. But it does have terrific pacing overall and that attention to pacing extends to the use of darkness and the various lighting devices they have at their disposal.

Much use is made of the point of view nature of the lighting: flashlights and cameras and even after they are gone much of the blocking uses those sensibilities. Its a subtle fold, but so very effective. It makes us see what these women do and joins us to them in terror.

There's an effective plot device that pings off this. One of our women has visions, which we follow until we have our legs pulled out from us and her. The ending has one of these — two endings — where we aren't quite sure which is real and which imagined. The idea that both are true is the most unsettling.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

The Descent is a film that plays with the theme of claustrophobia. Effective usage of lighting. I am pleasantly shocked by how well orchestrated this film is.

An interesting and differentiated horror movie in the "gore" style. It is above average for the genre. It started slowly, but after half it became interesting, maintaining a tense atmosphere, a little frightening and claustrophobic. The atmosphere is good. It can be divided into two parts: before and after the cave. You sit on the armchair during the exhibition with that feeling of agony and distress. It escapes from the usual clichés to the genre, having an unconventional and surprising ending. There are some logic flaws in the plot and the characters, but nothing that compromises the story. The curiosity is to see the cast practically all feminine. It's worth as entertainment. I recommend it to all lovers of horror art.