The Descent — scrobble.life

Well a movie from 2005, not something most people would be after but since I do watch content and read on a daily bases, even during the past month where I have been working a couple of things to balance my time and been able to be more consistent on Hive, I get content refer all the time either by friends online or any other content related service, The Descent (2005) is one of them that kept coming up after I saw Heretic (2024). A very very very dark movie visually, there is a huge part of the movie that is all pitch black and not much to see so this is one that has to be watch in the highest resolution you could, in fact I started watching on a regular 1080p release and had to find a better Blue Ray release to appreciate it better.

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0435625/
Platform: AppleTV+

Rottentomatoes Rating

Source Even with all the dark scenes the movie manage to create a lot of tension because of the unknown, claustrophobia and fear that is not hard to get caught up with as its so dark and you have no idea from where you going to get jump from on this underground world even when there are so many questions about how this monsters that actually look like humans end up down there.

The movie develops around three main characters, those are Sarah, Juno and Beth who enjoy extreme sports and adventures, the first scene is the three of them doing rafting while Sarah's husband Paul and her daughter Jessica watch from the shore, tragedy strikes almost immediately when Sarah have a big lost during a car crash, both her husband and daughter dies so she felt have very little to live for until she starts getting back into this kinda of extreme adventures with a new group of women, still Juno and Beth on it but there has been some distance between them after the accident, specially Juno but they seem to want to get back to how things were before.

Source

Source The plot of the movie is not complicated at all, this first tragic scene was to spice things up but the real sauce is how and what they find down on the caverns they exploring, I had no clue people do this for fun but the very first scene when they get into a tight tight space where they can barely fit, IM OUT!!! hell no, you go down that route because I'm going back up to the surface. Juno got them to a set of caverns nobody has explore before just for the fun of a new adventure and get to claim them, if we think about it this is a big flaw on the plot as how someone with "experience" on this game get to make such a stupid decision.

It all goes south when they start to loose their gear and face a huge challenge on moving from one cavern to another on a terrain that nobody has seen or explore before, at least that is what they though until they start finding climbing that might be 100 years old or at least that's the expression they use in one scene. This last idea makes me think every other monster they find on the caverns are a group of humans that got lost and eventually start evolving to adapt living in this caverns, its a very sci fi extreme though but not impossible, so the hunt begins and friendships are destroy as the group of women starts despairing.

The cast delivers some seriously impressive performance that make the horror feel real, I say this because first its not easy at all to make close environment movies work out with very few characters but this movie goes to the extreme into this concept and I still kept watching and interested on what was going to happen next and how a conflict between Sarah and Juno start growing.

Source

Source Shauna MacDonald really stands out as the main character; playing Sarah, showing a woman who was barely holding on keeping her life together after loosing her family, from the entire group you might think she would be the first one to give up and die like on the first ten minutes of been lost inside the caverns. Natalie Mendoza plays Juno, another great performance, not necessarily as the bad one from the movie but for sure the selfish one because she didn't got the group to those caverns to claim them together, she wanted to accomplish it as a personal acolyte it's just that for some reason she didn't want to go alone probably didn't have the courage to do it so.

I could tell how the audience could be divided at watching this movie since its very unreal something like this would ever happen, specially finding a creature close to Gollum from LOTR down there but this is not a documentary or a story based on life events so any crazy story that is entertaining is welcome I would say.

I could tell how this movie might be inspired or at least has similarities with other horror movies but one aspect that makes it so twisted is the ending, there is a UK and US version of the movie, both with different ending. On the US theatrical release Sarah manage to escape from the caves, get to one of their cars and drive away so she lives. On the UK version things are more darker and I had to look for this version online since I had no clue, I watch the US version first but on this other version Sarah had a dream or hallucination of escaping, she was still at the caves trapped underground in that situation she would most likely die for sure as the monsters keep getting closer to her. If I had watch the UK version I think the movie would have been so much better, the reason why I say this is because not very often there are movies with such a dark ending, instead of ending with Sarah as the hero or survivor, its all darkness, doom and hopelessness, this is the kind of ending that makes you think and say out loud WTF!!!!

The Descent (2005) is a movie that I really enjoy a lot, mainly because it is a type of movie that most of the time fails at been great, tight space, few characters, very dark, this is just a combination of aspects that not many directors know how to turn into greatness. The support cast had their own bright moments and were never screen time huggers meaning that the main characters shine as they are expected too in this world of darkness, yes its true that it would be better if there was some backstory about the monsters although you had two put two and two together to know this were humans that got lost and evolve, we have male and female monsters, this becomes more clear when the female monster look worry about what happen to one of the youngest one. A great movie I would recommend but not before setting the right expectations mainly because of how dark in terms of visually dark the movie is, its like 70% of the movie on the caverns were you cant see sht, reason why I gave it a 7/10 and for sure would watch again some day.

#skiptvads, #inleo, #hive, #descent, #cave, #horror, #claustrophobia, #survival, #women, #crawlers, #darkness, #trauma, #friendship, #betrayal, #fear, #adventure, #spoil, #death, #grief, #escape, #hallucination, #monsters, #exploration, #tension, #secrets, #blood, #nightmare

Posted Using INLEO