THE DESCENT (N Marshall)

( Neil Marshall / 2005 )

THE DESCENT follows an all-female group of thrill-seekers who, whilst uncovering a hitherto uncharted underground cave system, uncover an also hitherto unrecorded species of cave dwelling carnivores who appreciate our unlucky heroines in the same way students appreciate Pot Noodles. Of course, "our heroines" is slightly misleading as although Marshall does spend some time setting the women up to be likable (or at least not annoying), the moment the blind humanoid mutants turn up it becomes clear that Marshall considers his characters completely secondary to a good scare and a fountain of blood.

The film gives over much of its running time to monsterless underground caving sequences and it is a tribute to Marshall's skill as a horror director that these sequences are tense, even though the situations they find themselves in are textbook (they get lost, they get stuck, their equipment gets left behind, ad nauseum). At one point a character gets stuck squirming through a small tunnel and the camera subtly revolves on its axis, both as a metaphorical turning of the screw on the character's situation and as a means of communicating the space (or lack of) she's found herself in. It's one of many nice touches that display in a stylishly cinematic way the encroaching claustrophobia as the women's chances of surviving diminish by the minute. The thought that goes into the set up and the exploration of the space, along with the genuine disinterest in which characters live or die, means that when Marshall turns on the blood works the many, many jump scares manage to not interrupt the pervading tension. Even though overall THE DESCENT feels familiar and perhaps even a little dull because of it, Marshall's Devil is in the detail and so his cave of horrors deserves to be called one of the best sculpted mainstream horrors of recent years.