The Preview
Six women (Juno, Sarah, Beth, Holly, Rebecca and Sam) go on a caving expedition without knowing the worst has yet to come. The arrived at a rest house and decided to depart for the cave after a good night rest. It takes quite a while before arriving at the cave as it involves a long drive over a country road and jungle-trekking. The cave entrance looks spectacular and some of them seem worried while the others are excited.
Once they are in the cave, they are impressed and ventured further down the cave. At some point of caving, they stop for food and drinks. Tensions are building up when they talk about an incident that happened a year ago. Sarah avoids the topic by turning away from the group to look out for possible entrance. She founds one and they cave into the tunnel one by one. Intermittently, Sarah hears strange noises in the surrounding. Worried, but she can do nothing except to continue the expedition.
As the tunnel is small, Sarah gets stuck half way. She soon becomes panic and starts to breathe heavily. Juno goes back in the tunnel to help Sarah but they are horrified when the tunnel roof starts to cave in. Fortunately, they both manage to get out just before the tunnel collapse. However, they left behind an equipment bag.
Juno then owns up that it is not the cave they are supposed to be in and they have to find a way out instead of waiting for rescuers. Seeing that they have no other options, they continue the expedition. Soon, they encounter flesh-eater-human-like creature just before their eyes. Holly is killed while the others run for their life, ignoring the direction they are heading.
The Story
The Descent was truly exciting and thrilling to watch. At first, I thought that it was a bit different as it involved all women and no men. In addition, I have never heard about the title of this movie previously. However, it was pulsating and left no time for me to rest but to keep wondering what would happen next.
The Effects
Normally, thriller and horror movies use sound effects to scare the audience. The Descent was indeed different. To be honest, I had to switch off the sound and read the subtitle at some point as it was late in the middle of the night. However, it was still great to watch.
The recording methods were a little bit of everything yet they combined very well. There were frames of normal recording, running while recording, and first person recording as well as night vision video camera recording. Bear with me as I do not know the exact word to describe the above. However, they all summed up good and did not leave me in the dark as you know; you never get much sunlight in caves.
Verdict
Again, I just wanted to say exciting. Not the best but everything just clicked very well. I would say that it looked like a low budget movie but doing things exaggeratedly will just spoil any movies and this movie was just about right. There were no heroes and each of them was fighting for their survival in the cave with the hope of getting out the cave in the end. The ending was either love or hate.
