The Descent (2005)
This post contains major spoilers.
You ever have one of those days, maybe a road trip or a vacation, where nothing went right?
In The Descent, six spelunking women head out on an adventure to explore a system of caves located in North Carolina. The girls are all expert climbers, and have done their homework prior to entering the cave. They’ve brought all the equipment necessary to get them into and out of the cave, made sure that the cave has three exits in case anything goes wrong, and even brought a map of the cave in case they get lost.
But when it rains, it pours. A cave in blocks the path the original entrance to the cave, and in the following scene another girl admits that they’ve actually entered an unmapped, unexplored cave (she was hoping they would name it after them). The group finds themselves stuck underground with no known exit, a finite amount of light, and no extended source of food or water. This day couldn’t get any worse!
(Ten minutes later, a series of mole-like humanoid creatures arrive intent on eating the girls’ faces.)
It’s been a long time since I sat through a movie as tense as The Descent, a film that is constantly tightening the screws of tension. While I’m not particularly claustrophobic, I think almost anyone would squirm if they were crawling through a crevice barely large enough to fit through when the sound of rocks breaking surrounded them. Everything in the movie is a ticking clock — lights, food, water, air, and ultimately, the relationships. No one has a cell phone, no one is sure which passage leads to the surface, and every time the group stops to gather their wits, “crawlers” arrive to attack. At first it’s one, then it’s more than one, and before long it’s a lot more than one. Imagine if in Jaws the protagonists were scuba divers running out of air and trapped under ice.
Final spoiler warning.
Sarah, the film’s main protagonist, suffers more tragedies than the rest of the group. In the beginning of the film, her husband and daughter are killed in a head on collision, and her best friend, Juno, abandons her. Inside the cave, Sarah learns that Juno had an affair with Sarah’s husband, which weighs into her decision to abandon Juno and let the crawlers feast upon her face. At the end of the film, Sarah finds the exit and makes her escape as the sole survivor of the group.
That is, if you watched the American version. In the UK release, which is roughly a minute longer, Sarah’s escape turns out to be a hallucination. After a quick jump scare, the film cuts back to Sarah in the cave, about to meet the latest wave of crawlers. Survivor count, zero.
Sometimes, the sharks win.