LITERAL REMAINS

A group of girlfriends meet every year on vacation to do some extreme sport or other.  The year of their rafting trip is tragic for Sarah; returning home, there is a traffic accident, and her husband and young daughter are killed.  It’s a long year of recuperation.

Finally, though, Sarah relents and joins her friends for a cave dwelling vacation organized by Juno.  Things don’t go as smooth as they all had planned.  The cave is actually unexplored, a little fact that Juno neglects to tell everyone.  Accidents happen, and they have to look for an new exit because they can’t leave the way they entered.

Nerves fray, stress mounts.  The group tries to keep it together, and they try to keep from turning on each other.  The cave itself threatens to destroy them, if not physically, mentally.  The darkness toys with them, and they get to a point where they have to question what’s real and what’s not.

Also, there are those damn creatures trying to eat them.

The Descent was Neil Marshall’s follow up to his debut film, Dog Soldiers.  This movie doesn’t play around.  It’s horror, pure and simple.  Even if the monsters had not have been in the movie, it still would have been a stellar piece of cinema.  Luckily, there are monsters, and the danger is tripled:  attacks from each other, the cave, and the humanoid creatures.  Or is the danger quadrupled?  Attacks from their own minds?

Like Dog Soldiers, there is action found here, but in this movie, with Sarah and her friends, it’s more suspenseful, there’s more tension.  Which is the better movie?  That’s like playing favorites with your kids.  Both possess a certain perfection and class.

Despite the addition of flesh eating creatures, it all feels real.  Or is it real?  The Descent can be interpreted a couple of different ways.  Has Sarah finally gone off the deep end and started killing everyone?  Are the monsters real?  Did Sarah die in the car crash with her husband and daughter?

Any which way you look at it, The Descent is not a bottom dweller.

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