Movies - The Descent

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	Movies - The Descent

The Descent is a 2005 British horror film, directed and written by Neil Marshall, known for the film Dog Soldiers
(2002). It was released in the UK on 8 July, 2005, having been premiered at the Dawn Horror Film Festival on 6 July, 2005. Box office receipts during its U.K. run totalled over $4,900,000.

It has received a theatrical release in France, Germany, Ireland, and Spain to name a few with a release date in the United States set for 2006.

Cast

MyAnna Burning as Sam
Natalie Jackson as Juno
Shauna Macdonald as Sarah
Saskia Mulder as Rebecca
Nora Jane-Noone as Holly
Alex Reid as Beth

Plot

Tagline: Face your deepest fear.

The film features a caving expedition by a team of six women, involving climbing with climbing equipment, and crawling. One of the women, Sarah, is still mentally recovering from a car accident the previous year (depicted in a prologue) where her husband and daughter died. The leader of the group is Juno, who thinks she abandoned Sarah after her accident and is trying to make ammends by protecting her and assuring she would watch over her. Juno is also the most experienced spelunker of the group, and also the most athletic girl in the bunch.

Juno leads them to the cave entrance, an enormous crack right in the middle of the ground. They descend to the bottom of this cave, and then go down a rock "chimney", a narrow tunnel that leads into the depths of the cave itself. After exploring for a while and getting deeper and deeper inside the cave system, they decide to get out through another web of tunnels. They get into a very narrow tunnel, and after the rest of the girls have gone through, Sarah gets stuck and panics. Fulfilling her word, Juno goes back for Sarah, soothes her, but both realize the cave is unstable. Rushing, Juno manages to get Sarah out before the cave collapses, losing their bag with ropes in the process.

Stuck in an unknown part of the cave, and under the pressure of her friends, Juno admits they are not in any known cave system. The cave is not even mapped, since she expected them to be the first ones to set foot there. Their only choice is to find an exit for themselves.

They proceed deeper into the caves until they reach a chasm. They cross it and find a very old python stuck in the roof of the cave, evidence that someone was before them long ago, but clearly didn´t manage to get out since the caves remained unknown. Soon after, one of the girls breaks her leg while foolishly running after what she thought was daylight. The girls go after her and tend her wounds. Very close to the place of the accident, Sarah finds an old helmet, and also sees what seemed to be a naked, totally pale human being drinking from an underwater pond. She tells her friends, who don´t believe her.

They proceed, now dragging their wounded friend. They reach a cave where a painting in the wall seem to indicate that the mountain had two entrances, filling them with hope. They go on following the wind currents, until they reach a room where they become confused and light a flare. They find then that the room is littered with bones and are attacked by the creatures previously seen by Sarah. They rip the wounded girl´s throat, and start dragging her body into the darkness. Juno, raising herself as protector of the group, fights with the creature but finally loses her grip on her friend´s body whe she is attacked from the back. She manages to kill the creature with her rock hammer, but when she feels another presence behind her back, she turns suddenly and accidentally stabs Beth in the throat with the hammer. Beth grabs Juno´s pendant before falling to the ground, and Juno, completely shocked, leaves her for dead.

Following the confusion, the group is split in three, with Sarah left on her own. Juno finds an arrow painted on the wall, presumably indicating an exit, but goes back to find her friends. She reunites with two of her friends, killing another creature (Juno kills a bunch of creatures in the film), but instead of leading her to the exit, she states they have to go back and find Sarah.

Meanwhile, Sarah finds the moribund Beth. Beth tells her that Juno abandoned her after she wounded her, and gives Sarah Juno´s pendant. The pendant had inscribed a phrase that was referred as Sarah´s husband favorite saying. This makes clear that Sarah´s husband distraction -which caused the accident as shown at the beginning of the film - had been caused because his conflicting emotions about Sarah and Juno. At Beth´s requests, Sarah kills her smashing her head with a rock, and goes on.

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