Warning: spoilers!
Six hardened adventurers and thrill seekers go caving. Except this is no
ordinary cave – it is virgin ground, unnamed and unexplored. Or at least,
no-one has ever survived to name it, or chart its passageways, populated as
they are by a race of humanoid monsters perfectly adapted to the claustrophobic
caverns.
The set up for The Descent is not unlike many horror movies – all the pieces of
the formula are there – dark, scary setting, monsters, a group of foolhardy
explorers venturing into the lion’s den. What is different is that all of these
adventurers are women.
It’s a sad state of affairs perhaps, but this inevitably makes the film about
gender to some extent. And in many ways, it breaks new, welcome ground. There
is no experienced male character to heroically lead the way to safety and fend
of the monsters (in fact the only male actor is shockingly and messily
dispatched very early on). These women don’t need one. And they are real,
rounded characters not cardboard cut outs – perhaps because of the fact they
are women, they are not slotted into the traditional boxes of hero, heroine,
coward, comedian and token minority that usually populate these sorts of films.
But, I feel that this promising beginning is chipped away at until what is
presented is far more ambivalent.
These women are tough, experienced in everything from base jumping to white
water rafting. It’s clear that they seek to push things to the limit. Girl’s
own adventure stuff. Except this is not that type of film. Instead of an action
movie/romp, this is a hard, gritty subversion of the Indian Jones school (one of
the group on seeing the cave entrance quips ‘I’m not Tombraider’). And the use
of an all-woman cast is, I would argue, an intrinsic part of that.
I was interested to find out this film was directed by Neil Marshall, whose
previous effort, Dog Soldiers, was a low budget werewolf flick. In that film,
an all-male group of soldiers is led to its destruction by a woman who tempts
them into the lair of her werewolf family. And it includes a really terrible
time of the month joke, setting it miles apart from the much more interesting
Ginger Snaps.
Crassly, one of the chapter titles on the DVD edition of Dog Soldiers is ‘All
Women are Bitches’.
So perhaps it is not surprising that the women in The Descent get in trouble
because they go a step too far – they enter into the male territory of the
explorer, and, despite a valiant effort, it beats them.
This is a very claustrophobic film. Trapped in tiny spaces, in the looming dark,
even without phosphorous-white, dripping creatures behind every corner, it is
utterly terrifying.
But after the first scare, the women quickly find they are a match for these
creatures. They can bludgeon them to death, and if they can do this often
enough to find the way out they’ll be ok.
This isn’t Buffy though. The sympathetic characters are quickly killed off,
leaving two. Sarah, a mother bled of her humanity by the death of her husband
and child, and Juno – who is uncomfortably wedged into the role of villain,
having got everyone trapped in the first place, slept with Sarah’s husband and
left one of the group to die. It is no co-incidence that she is the most
determined and hard-core daring-do character of them all.
Horror films usually succeed by establishing a them-versus-us mentality – the
humans band together (with the potential for one or two bad eggs), and are
allowed to kill, maim and slaughter the monsters without compunction because
they really are just that – inhuman, outside of the moral sphere.
But in The Descent, bludgeoning the monsters makes the characters just as
monstrous. Hence the killing is fairly full on – caving in their soft white
sculls, or pushing thumbs through their blind, sticky eye sockets.
The Descent complicates the traditional horror movie set up by showing the
killing in grim, viscous detail. And even more so, through the traumatic effect
it has on the characters. And the capacity for horrendous mistakes when
people/women let themselves loose in bloody mayhem – in one scene, having just
killed a monster, Juno hears a noise behind her. Thinking it’s another monster,
she swings her pick axe around without looking, to find she’s buried it in her
friend’s neck.
That’s bad enough but it’s the woman’s failing voice pleading not to be left
alone that creates the real horror in the scene rather than the seeping neck
wound.
The true brutality in the film is not the by-the-numbers scary thing in the
shadows, it’s the horror that these women are capable of, and the effects of
this trauma on them.
And the end of the film bears this out. The sole surviving character seems to
have made it out. Shaking, coated in blood, she scrambles into a waiting car
and drives away. She pulls off the road and vomits. There’s no sense of relief
here – but an uncomfortable realization that it would not be possible to come
out of such an experience with any piece of mind. Except it’s all a
hallucination. She’s really back in the cave, stuck without any hope of escape.
But there’s the true relief – she’s been put through so much, there’s no such
thing as salvation for her. Instead her mind simply snaps and she sits with her
imaginary dead daughter waiting for the light to go out – in reality a signifier
for her death but in her mind the blowing out of birthday candles and the final
wish of her daughter.
Unlike the climax to The Thing, and other films which do not let any of their
characters escape – there’s no heroism to this. She’s not saving anyone, quite
the reverse. She dies having taken her revenge on her disloyal friend, hacking
her in the leg so she won’t be able to flee from the monsters – a type of
revenge that would be called ‘below the belt’ if these characters were men.
And that’s the key to why this film is such an ambiguous portrayal of gender – it has been stripped of heroism, and I can’t help but wonder if the all-female
cast was being used by the filmmaker to enact this.
The main character Sarah is put in a typical difficult hero position – forced to
leave her friend behind, with the real possibility the monsters will eat her
alive. There’s no soft focus hand holding as she slips away – Sarah must cave
her head in with the skull of one of the monsters’ former victims.
Because although these are strong women, there are no heroics here – not to say
the women do not put on significant displays of courage, bravery and
perseverance. Instead, most the characters’ strength invokes some of history’s
more misogynistic portrayals of women – they get a Medea-ish, semi-crazy look
in their eyes when they kill.
The cave itself can also be read as indicative of a fear of strong women –
enclosed, damp, and semi-virginal, at one point Sarah plunges into a pool of
blood.
So while these women are no wilting damsels, waiting to be rescued, neither are
they allowed to fill the shoes of men in similar films. What is the message
here, really? That women can be strong and tough and defend themselves. But
also that they don’t pull through. That an adventurous lifestyle leads them to
a sticky end. That maybe they should just stay home. And that Indiana
Jones-style, swashbuckling heroics are not for them.