Netflix describes them as dealing with an “ominous presence.” This is misleading. It’s just the characters going crazy. There’s a touch of misdirection to imply a supernatural element, but it doesn’t take long to figure out that they’re all just nuts.
This is pretty good. At least, it’s better than I thought it would be. It’s very much like The Descent, but without the subtext and the character development. The direction doesn’t use the large cavernous spaces, but it does focus on some small passages - just not as effectively as they did in The Descent.
When I started watching this, for some reason, it started about 2 minutes in. I didn’t notice this: I just assumed that’s how the movie started. This actually improved the movie. It didn’t start with a bang, but it just built nicely over time. Once I finished the movie, I looked up a review of it, and found that it complained about two opening elements. I went back and watched those first two minutes, and realized that those two minutes were a big mistake.
First, the movie opens with a text bit about how this is “inspired by a true story.” Then it goes on to talk about a recent group of miners that was trapped underground. The second mistake is that the movie opens at the end of the story, with a rescue worker breaking through and finding the survivor. I’m tired of that. It’s a sign that nothing exciting happens early in your script, so some rearrangement was needed to spice things up.
There was something I enjoyed about this, and it was probably a sense of the story being unpredictable. Odd things would happen, and it’s hard to say that any of them were explained. It’s entirely possible that I wasn’t following things closely enough to figure out who did what, but I don’t think the story was written to be airtight.
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