Film 81: The Descent

Neil Marshall's second film is, for my money, the best movie in this book. So good is it in fact that the section on The Descent pretty much wrote itself. Which is good because I spent several hours knocking out a couple of thousand words on the film, then lost nearly all of it due to some unspecified computer error and had to rewrite while the basic structure was fresh in my memory.

There are a lot of nice touches in the film that don't necessarily register the first time around, like a brief shot of Sarah's never-mentioned medication that she doesn't take with her to the cave. Above all it's the ambiguity that really hits the spot. Are the crawlers real? Is Sarah hallucinating? If so, when does that start? What's real and what's not? Absolutely superb stuff.