You Love to See It: The Descent

Neil Marshall’s The Descent is a straightforward act of symbolic transubstantiation, transforming protagonist Sarah’s trauma over the loss of her husband and daughter into the fathomless cave system into which she and her friends penetrate as part of a thrill-seeking group tradition. Sarah’s titular descent functions as a proxy for a rushed confrontation with her buried grief, an exploration of the galleries and tunnels it has carved within her personality. As the women progress further and further into the network of caves, the tone of their fear begins to change. What starts out as simple panic at discovering one of their number, Juno, has led them off-map into an uncharted system slowly shifts into a kind of violent revulsion as they confront the troglodytic “crawlers”, degenerate carnivorous hominids.

The other women succumb quickly, taken by violence and accident, until only Sarah and Juno — the two most intimately tied to the film’s initial trauma — remain. For Juno the descent is an unmitigated disaster, a clusterfuck of selfishness, recklessness, and bad luck, but for Sarah it carries a certain tinge of psychosexual liberation. In the crawlers she finds a guiltless target for her violent, self-destructive urges, in her discovery that Juno was involved in an affair with her late husband, a chance to experience catharsis related to his death by swinging a climbing pick into the other woman’s thigh. That we glimpse at one point a female crawler with an infant cradled in her arm is no accident; Sarah’s premature encounter with her own grief recreates its source. She lacks the tools to do otherwise.

Where many films depict feminine grief as passive and lethargic, The Descent casts it as something almost atavistic, a raging, blood-slicked figure of unthinking violence. There’s a distinctly Greek quality to the emotion, something reminiscent of the wailing and rending of garments which typify that ancient culture’s expressions of loss in the whirlwind of shrieking violence Sarah unleashes first on the crawlers and later on Juno, her fellow human being. Touching grief is not a matter of quiet contemplation, or of soft tears in a therapist’s neutral-toned office; it is the channeling of our species’ oldest, most primordial emotions through the fragile vessel of the human psyche.