I’m going to take you through how I understand The Descent.
Remember, storytelling is based on known techniques and best practices, with the goal to have viewers experience specific emotions from one beat to the next. The filmmakers make conscious decisions about which techniques and practices to employ to achieve their desired outcome. When you learn the techniques, it becomes easier to recognize them.
There are two crucial things to understand. First, storytelling is built on three levels of information: text, context, and subtext. And that information primarily modifies plot, character, and/or theme.
Most mainstream movies follow similar structures: they introduce you to who, what, where, and when. Then a bunch of stuff happens that builds to a climax and a conclusion. The conclusion is only impactful because of all the information that led up to it (context and subtext).
Think about The Descent. Say the movie started with Sarah hitting Juno with a pickaxe in the leg and leaving her in a cave. You wouldn’t have the necessary information to understand why she made that choice. But because it’s at the end of the movie, we have the context of past scenes, which means we understand the subtext of the pendant and why Sarah would be murderously upset with Juno.
The other thing to keep in mind is that most mainstream storytelling relies on a change in dynamics. The main character wants something. They either get it, don’t, or replace it with a new desire. And the result is positive, negative, or a mix. So imagine a movie where someone wants a promotion. There’s a version of the story where they get the promotion and their entire life improves. Another version, they get the promotion but it’s not what they hoped it would be and their life is worse than before. And another version where maybe their work-life is better but it costs them their marriage. Each version conveys a different message that adds to an overall statement.
The Descent Is About More Than Grief
The Descent opens with Sarah and two friends on this rafting adventure. It’s difficult but they’re happy and working together to survive the rapids. At the end, we see Sarah’s husband and daughter. Sarah jokingly knocks Juno into the water. Sarah goes to her daughter, while her husband helps Juno, and the other friend is on their own.
The husband’s interaction with Juno doesn’t send up any major red flags. In real life, him helping her isn’t a big deal. But this is a story that wants to convey specific information. So when Sarah chooses to go to the daughter and the husband chooses to help Juno, that’s subtextual information. A Marvel movie might choose to turn the subtext into text by having Juno say something like “I wish we could stop hiding our relationship.” But Neil Marshall opted to slowly reveal that information. So he simply uses subtext to lay the foundation for these dynamics.
What do we see in the very next scene, in the car? The first shot shows the husband with a strange expression on his face. He then recoils from Sarah’s attempt to hold his hand. This is actual textual evidence that something isn’t right with their relationship. What could possibly have him upset? In real life, it could be many things. But in the world of the movie, the only context we have is that he just interacted with Juno. So the assumption is that Juno is the source of the husband’s negativity toward Sarah.
This is a good place to mention that stories often dramatize reality. We call this defamiliarization: the idea that something normal is made unfamiliar through the fantastic aspects of fiction. So, in real life, the relationship between Sarah and her husband might deteriorate over the course of a few weeks or months, before finally imploding, causing her to lose her family. In a movie, you can represent that existential loss through the car crash that causes Sarah to literally lose her husband and daughter. It allows you to skip the complexities of “how she loses her family” and get to the meat of “how does losing her family impact Sarah?”
While it’s obvious that The Descent is about grief, I think people overlook a crucial thematic aspect.
Go back to the opening scene. Rafting takes teamwork. Sarah, Juno, and Beth rely on each other to succeed. But the stakes were relatively low. Spelunking is a next-level endeavor. And what do we see happen? Things start off nice and easy, with everyone in the group on their best behavior. Over the course of the descent, relationship dynamics breakdown. Juno, for example, had lied and brought the group into an unexplored cave. Her betrayal of the group mirrors her betrayal of Sarah’s marriage. And, just like before, tragedy follows.
In both cases, there’s tension between appearances and reality, exterior and interior, how people behave on the surface and what’s going on beneath the surface. Go back to the very beginning of the movie, to the very opening shot, and what do you see?
It’s pretty common for filmmakers to use the first shot or two to convey a visual metaphor that encapsulates the movie’s main theme. It’s not a coincidence, or accident, that The Descent opens with a visual that resembles the yin-yang, the balance of light and dark. And, of course, the dark part takes up the bottom of the frame.
So the very, very first thing The Descent shows us is a visual representation of tension, of the push and pull between opposing forces and philosophies. When you watch the movie a second time, knowing everything, the opening scene has a new meaning. The three happy friends aren’t as perfect as they seem. Not only was Juno sleeping with Sarah’s husband, but Beth knew about it and didn’t say anything. All their laughter and banter hides the fact that there are some seriously dark things going on.
Now apply that same analysis to the caving trip and you see how “the descent” actually becomes a metaphor for getting at the truth. The deeper into the cave the women go, the more they have to confront the truth about themselves, their bonds, etc.
The monsters are a type of defamiliarization, an externalization. Movies are a visual medium, so filmmakers have to find a way to represent existential, emotional, non-visual concepts. They accomplish that through physical externalizations that serve as metaphors for whatever is going on internally.
For example, this is how the script sets up Sam’s death.
The tunnel has run out, and before her lies a deep gorge similar to the one REBECCA crossed earlier, about twenty feet across, with no way around it… Above her, the roof of the cavern arcs over the gorge, and there she sees her chance. Emulating her big sister, she sees a crack spanning the roof that could take her to the far side…
What happens? In the middle of trying to cross, a crawler attacks and kills her. The crucial element here is that Neil Marshall called out Sam trying to emulate Rebecca, her big sister. That turns the interaction from an individual simply trying to survive a cave monster to a little sister trying to live up to the example set by an older sister. The crawler isn’t just a monster trying to kill her but the embodiment of Sam’s insecurity about not being as good as her sister.
That brings us to the final thing I want to talk about: the ending.
The Descent’s Ending
Keep in mind everything we’ve discussed so far. Now turn your attention to the final confrontation between Sarah and Juno. Before the two confront each other, they battle some crawlers and win. Remember, crawlers represent internal struggles each character has. While others succumbed to those struggles, Sarah and Juno win. Sarah’s no longer the overwhelmed, grief-stricken woman she was in the aftermath of losing her husband and daughter. She’s fought through all that negativity to arrive at this place of terrifying calm and confidence.
Juno’s always been confident. You could even say she’s a narcissist. The reason she can so easily conquer the crawlers, her own demons, is because of that narcissism. She lies to herself the way she lies to others. And survives better than others because of it.
When Sarah shows Juno the pendant, signaling Sarah knows about the affair, we watch Juno’s face as she processes the information. Her confidence vanishes. Fear flashes. And just then we hear the distant scream of a crawler. Juno breaks eye contact with Sarah, confirmation that her self-assurance has shattered. Sarah then spikes Juno in the leg with a pickaxe.
I just want to highlight that after the two had defeated the crawlers, the script actually says: The two women stare at each other, and they no longer recognize their former selves in the apparitions that now stand here, filled with blood lust. They have become consumed by the darkness.
Sarah had a choice. She could have put aside the past and worked with Juno to leave the cave. Together, the two would go back to the surface. Instead, she gives into her anger, her pain, her negativity. The script describes it as “a cold, calculated, deliberate killing.” And the result is the two of them will remain lost in the darkness.
Sarah’s hallucination of escape is another example of the tension between appearance and reality. The movie could have given her a relatively happy ending, because that’s what Hollywood has trained audiences to expect—the protagonist goes through a ton of difficulty in order to earn their victory. And audiences tend to enjoy those stories because it allows us to believe that when unfair things happen in our own lives that there will be some kind of karmic return that will balance the scales. Getting fired from your job isn’t the end of the world but a setup for life giving you a better job. Your relationship had to end so this better person could enter into your life. Etc. Etc. It’s the “everything happens for a reason” way of viewing the world.
But that’s not reality, is it? In real life, you may not find a better job. Or a better relationship. You can’t replace a child. Sometimes, the hits keep coming. Sometimes, the grief wins.
That’s why Sarah ends up back in the cave. Even if she had physically escaped, her soul would have stayed down there. Grief won. Anger won. Revenge won. She did not overcome her sorrow. Which is why the film originally ended with Sarah having a vision of celebrating her daughter’s birthday. The camera zooms out, showing how huge the cave is, as the crawlers scream. All of that implies the immensity and intensity of Sarah’s grief overwhelming her.
The Descent’s ending is “happy” in the sense that Sarah winds up with her daughter (Marshall compared it to the movie Brazil, where insanity is a tragedy but also a type of freedom), but it’s sad because the reunion isn’t real.
The American version cut Sarah actually waking up in the cave. Instead, we just see Juno’s corpse in the truck then Sarah’s eyes open. It’s implied the escape was a vision but not “confirmed”. But, like I said before, even if she had escaped, we know she’ll forever carry the weight of having killed Juno. From the script: SARAH slumps forward onto the steering wheel in a state of overwhelming emotional turmoil. Torn by feelings of sorrow, anger, remorse and guilt, she can only attempt to gather some sort of composure.
Either way, the point for the audience is the same: if you give in to your darker urges, fears, and emotions, if you descend to that level, you’ll be lost.
Was All Of The Descent Sarah’s Hallucination?
If you notice, when Sarah first falls, she lands in a chamber that’s filled with bones. She then “wakes up” and climbs up a hill of skeletal remains to an exit. When she snaps out of the hallucination, she’s back in the chamber. Except there aren’t any bones. The script even calls this out: ECU of Sarah’s face as she jolts herself back to reality. She is back in the DARK CHAMBER that she fell into a few moments ago. Only we now see that [it] is not a BONE CHAMBER. Just a desolate ledge deep in the interior of the cave.
The bones being there one minute but not the next implies, to me, that there’s a chance the crawlers never existed, that all of that had been Sarah’s hallucination. When the women first approach the cave, Rebecca warns them that being in the cave can cause “dehydration, disorientation, claustrophobia, panic attacks, paranoia, hallucinations, visual and aural deterioration…”
In an early cut of the film, when Sarah wakes up in the hospital and has the hallucination where the lights go out in the hallway, Marshall had included a “shape scuttling around on the floor”. He explained this while doing a commentary for the EFAP podcast. Ultimately, he removed it for being “too implicit that it’s stuff going on in her head.”
Someone might argue that means Marshall didn’t intend the hallucination reading. But I think it’s more that he didn’t want the obvious confirmation. By removing the crawler from the hospital hallucination, he allowed for the ambiguity. Otherwise, if the shadow was there, the interpretation would be a lot more definitive.
Ultimately, the answer doesn’t matter. Whether it’s a hallucination or not, the point of the story is the same.
Cast
- Sarah – Shauna Macdonald
- Juno – Natalie Mendoza
- Beth – Alex Reid
- Sam – MyAnna Buring
- Rebecca – Saskia Mulder
- Holly – Nora-Jane Noone
- Paul – Oliver Milburn
- Jessica – Molly Kayll
- Written by – Neil Marshall
- Directed by – Neil Marshall
