Take the plunge with Neil Marshall’s The Descent, now streaming on Paramount+. This cave-set horror film became something of a cult hit in the mid-2000s as it unnerved the audiences who immersed themselves in its maelstrom of sound and light on the big screen. But even reduced to a smaller screen at home or on the go, this movie is still a standout in the genre because it’s rooted in the fundamentals of good moviemaking: craftsmanship and characterization.
THE DESCENT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: After a whitewater rafting expedition leaves Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) on an adventure high, life brings her crashing to a low point when her husband and daughter die in a tragic auto accident that she survives. Still reeling a year later, she reunites with friends in an attempt to close the distance that has grown between them. Their spelunking journey takes them literally into a cave but also into themselves, especially when the group leader Juno (Natalie Mendoza) reveals that she’s taken them into unknown and potentially unsafe territory. As they try to make their escape through mysterious terrain, they find that they are not just fighting nature and each other – but the cave harbors a petrifying species of golem-like creatures they come to call “crawlers.” In order to survive, confrontation with all these elements becomes a necessity.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: A group of friends/collaborators who come together in a remote location and find themselves battling off a supernatural force that breaks their bonds? The John Carpenter energy – think The Thing — is strong with this one. (The Evil Dead also comes to mind.) The emotional stakes of a woman battling the grief of a lost child while also dealing with the cruel twists of Murphy’s Law in an unforgiving terrain also make The Descent feel like a subterranean version of Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity.
Performance Worth Watching: Neil Marshall conducts quite the ensemble in The Descent, but it’s Shauna Macdonald who stands out among the cast. She’s given the emotional heavy lifting of transfiguring the trauma of her lost family into the shocking experiences in the cave. Without her grounding the increasingly wild events in familiar fears and feelings, the entire film could have gone off the rails.
Memorable Dialogue: “This is not caving, this is an EGO TRIP,” yells one of the women as they realize the mess they’re in. As usual in a horror flick, the danger comes from someone’s hubris in assuming they can outwit nature and skirt the rules in place for good reason.
Sex and Skin: The cave creatures are unclothed if that’s your kind of thing? In all seriousness, the only thing you’ll see piercing the skin in The Descent is a bone protruding from a bloody leg.
Our Take: Neil Marshall mines the abject terror of being in an unfamiliar environment where the rules can change at any minute with brutal effectiveness. It’s an all-out gorefest with terrifying jump scares and potent visuals, yes, but The Descent is also comfortable wielding silence and stillness as powerful weapons of fear. He further destabilizes the audience with aesthetic variations of light, color, and image source. Marshall finds terrors in the texture, plunging the viewer into the same state of confusion and volatility as the characters.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Over a decade and a half after its original release, The Descent is still an enormously efficient source of screams, scares, and scintillation. Neil Marshall knows there are no shortcuts to the terrifying result he wants to achieve, and he earns every moment.
Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based freelance film journalist. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared on Slashfilm, Slant, Little White Lies and many other outlets. Some day soon, everyone will realize how right he is about Spring Breakers.
