Britflix: The Descent

The Descent is the follow-up to Neil Marshall’s Dog Soldiers, and it is celebrating its 20^th Anniversary this year.

Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) is a woman who has suffered from tragedy after a whitewater rafting trip. A year after the death of her husband and daughter, Sarah goes to the Appalachian Mountains to go spelunking with her friends. Events take a terrifying turn when the women get lost in an unexplored cave system, and Sarah believes they are being watched by something.

The Descent is arguably Marshall’s best film. It has a 7.2 rating on IMDB, which is really impressive for a horror film, an 87% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and was shown at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival before its US release. It’s considered one of the best British horror films of the 2000s, so it stands with films like 28 Days Later, Eden Lake, and Marshall’s own Dog Soldiers. The Descent also led to a trio of caving horror films that were released around the same time. The British film was the only one to be fondly remembered.

The Descent does stand out from the two Marshall films that were released before and after it. Dog Soldiers and Doomsday were proud B-movies that focused on gore and action, appealing to the male audience. The Descent was a more female-led film that aimed to be more serious and weighty. The film played like a survival thriller, and the monsters didn’t appeal until the halfway point. I knew The Descent had monsters, but the appearance of the crawlers was still a surprise.

The Descent had tropes that were used in subsequent horror and survival films. They were the only tragedy and a time jump to a year later, tensions between characters because of a previous event, and a change of plan meant no one knew where to find the cavers, so they were forced to find their own way out of their predicament. These ideas ended up being used in films like Fall, Unwelcome, and Something in the Water. Comparisons with Something in the Water were particularly fitting because it was also a female-led film with one character who was an adrenaline junkie.

The Descent put in a lot of legwork in establishing the relationships between the women. There was a lot of tension between Sarah and Juno (Natalie Mendoza) after the events of the prologue. Sarah was hostile towards Juno and rejected Juno’s attempts to repair the relationship. The tensions were made worse when Juno told the group she had taken them to an unexplored cave system. These boiling issues were a throughline in the film, and it was just as tense as the action with the monsters.

The relationship between the women felt believable and was genuinely likeable. There was a fun sequence where the ladies were spending a night in a cabin before their adventure, and they even made fun of one of them because she was wearing silk pyjamas. This added to the sense of tragedy since the characters liked and cared for each other; they weren’t slasher fodder. It helped that the cast was made up of different nationalities, so their accents could differentiate them. However, the characters of Sam (MyAnna Buring) and Rebecca (Saskia Mulder) didn’t make as much of an impression compared to the rest of the cast.

For more gore-ordinated horror fans, The Descent provided. The crawlers were effective monsters since they were creatures that had adapted perfectly to cave life. They were agile and spider-like, pale, and had great hearing. They didn’t have eyes, but they didn’t need them, like many subterranean creatures. They were gruesome creatures since they were savage meat-eaters who wanted to turn the cavers into a meal. Juno turned into a badass as she had to fight the crawlers with a pickaxe, which led to one of the film’s most shocking moments. The other women tried to avoid the crawlers by staying silent, leading to a classic scene of a crawler right up to Sarah’s face.

I do find this titbit amusing: Dog Soldiers was set in Scotland but had to film in Luxembourg for tax reasons, and Doomsday’s big action scene was filmed in South Africa. Yet, Marshall’s American-set film was filmed in Scotland and Pinewood Studios. The Descent looked more convincing than some other American-set British productions. The production design and cinematography deserve a lot of praise because the scenes in the caves were tight and claustrophobic, whilst remaining clear and having brilliant lighting.

The Descent was an effective horror film that was a more strait-laced effort from Marshall due to the tone and characters, whilst still having a sense of fun.