Wednesday, January 23, 2008
I hadn't seen The Descent since it was in theaters, and I was glad to watch it again. It's a real rarity for us genre fans: a serious horror film. Despite on the surface being a gore-heavy monster movie, it tries genuinely to be an intense and disturbing experience, as well as one that is visually and thematically complex. Even some of last year's horror flicks that I raved about don't seem this layered, or as willing to deal with such loaded imagery.
Which is why it's such a shame that it's not quite a great film. It's a damn good one, but it just missed the bullseye. For one, it does start to get repetitive during the last 30 minutes or so... a few too many scenes of monsters suddenly JUMPING OUT OF THE DARK OMG!!! until it grows tiresome. It actually played better for me the second time, but some of the tension still drains. The acting/writing occasionally (not too often, but sometimes) is off, especially when the movie labors a little too hard to pull all the plot strands together. And there is once in a while some distractingly bad animation effects. (Especially those bats. Why didn't they just cut that shit right out of the movie?)
Enough with the bitching, because there is still a lot to love, especially in the imagery. Most notablly, I don't think it's a stretch to say that in a movie with only female characters, that maybe tries to explore the darker side of femininity... the tight caverns they crawl through are vaginal symbols. Not to mention the imagery that calls to mind motherhood, menstruation, fertility, birth, and so on.
Oh and of course, more broadly, the title doesn't just refer to a literal descent, and the dark caves suggest traveling into the darkest parts of the main character's mind (certainly into revenge, and perhaps madness).
I was happy to see the original ending in tact, which I have no idea why the American distributor removed it. It's all of a minute longer, and it adds the final dark, ambiguous touch that the movie needs to tie the atmosphere of the film together. In theaters here, in ended a minute earlier on a (kinda cheap) scare that was essentially the ending of The Grudge, and not the appropriate final word for this film. What did the distributor think? That Americans would love this movie until the last minute, and then tell their friends not to go see it because they hated the very end? Or just that we're too stupid to understand it? Assholes.
2 comments:
I remember this being the best horror movie I'd seen in ages when it came out a few years ago.
I see it as thematically similar to Alien in that same respect - only innner-space instead of outer space...women descending into a giant bloody vagina, only to be confronted by a bunch of penises. blah blah blah.
Deeper meaning or no, great horror flick.
There's definitely a strong Alien vibe here, at the very least because of the strong female protagonists. Also, I think that part where the chick climbs out of the pool of blood might be a Carrie homage.
I like that part also, because she kills what appears to be a child-monster, and then is attacked by a monster with breasts. I think the implication is that the female monster is the child's mother. And of course, the main character lost her child in an accident, and now she faces off against another grieving mother... somthing's going on here under the surface. I dig it.
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