Neil Marshall
The Descent - Discesa Nelle Tenebre

THE REVIEW

Here you finally have a modern horror with all the right ingredients.

A handful of young and beautiful girls, constantly in search of strong emotions, decide to satisfy their thirst for adventure in the claustrophobia and oppression of an unexplored underground environment. The right term is indeed "claustrophobia".

One of my many flaws is precisely having the terror of getting stuck in tight spaces. A very unpleasant sensation first invades the mind and then the body. The heart starts pounding faster and faster, a lump in the throat chokes you, you’re out of breath, cold sweat drops slide down your forehead. The brain advises you to stay calm, to think of something positive, but there's nothing to be done. An unstoppable automatic mechanism is set in motion.

For this reason, along with the not negligible fact that I suffer from vertigo, I have never loved extreme sports or excursions to overly wild places. "The Descent" will likely make an impression especially on couch potatoes like myself. On those, that is, who, as soon as they see someone trapped in a narrow little passage hundreds of meters underground, feel convulsions approaching.

Add to this a delightful surprise that bursts onto the scene when least expected, and you finally have a film that, when watched alone on a nice rainy night, puts some shivers down your spine. The tension slowly builds until it fully reveals its terrifying load in the final part.

In short, if you're in the mood to watch a tasty horror just for the sake of feeling a bit of a scare without necessarily trying to understand the socio-psychological implications of its meaning, "The Descent" is the one for you.