The Lobster Dance

Buckle your pants, readers, we’re in for another blood-bath of a horror film in The Descent, a 2005 British horror film with an all-female cast.* Some spoilers are necessary for a deeper analysis, so I put them at the very bottom under “spoilers” so the rest of the review could be mild on spoilers.

Via Bitch Flicks (Image of a photo of the six cavers taken before their descent)

This film is no co-ed slumber-party slasher flick but a nature/monster horror film about six badass adventure-seeking women, the core group of whom get together yearly to go rafting, hiking, or, in this case, caving.

The women meet up in the woods to explore a cave together, but when part of the cave collapses, they have to search for a way out–but they may not be alone in the cave.

My favorite thing about the film was that we had six athletic, adventurous women as the cast. While they are all fairly conventionally attractive, they’re great examples of women who can be on the femme of center and physically strong, capable, with impressive upper body strength. The movie largely (but not entirely) avoids the male gaze as well.

I generally felt this was a film with positive portrayals of women characters, but it’s not without its problems. As Robin Hitchcock writes,

According to the iron-clad authority of Wikipedia, The Descent was originally conceived with a mixed-gender cast, until director Neil Marshall’s business partner “realized that horror films almost never have all-female casts.” But the female cast of The Descent brings more than novelty. I also don’t ascribe to Marshall’s suggestion that the chief advantage of the all-female cast is more naked emotion in a terrifying situation [“The women discuss how they feel about the situation, which the soldiers in Dog Soldiers [Marshall’s previous horror film] would never have done.”] The women of The Descent actually approach their situation with what is, at least to my American eyes, quite the stiff upper lip.

The characters are great, but the cave setting, as Hitchcock writes, is a bit vaginal, and I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be read as “cis women’s bodies as a site of horror” or as a site of power. I didn’t see the cave as a metaphor until I got to the scene with the pond of blood, which I joked should be used in addition to the elevator scene from The Shining to convey menstrual distress.

Representation: Obviously the film passes the Bechdel test. However, Natalie Mendoza, who plays, Juno, is the only woman of color in the film (1:5). All the women are presumed straight (they talk about their boyfriends/husbands); I sensed some subtext between Juno and her “protege” Holly and also between Juno and Sarah, but it didn’t go anywhere.

Content warning: So much blood. The cinematographer and director really love to show spurting blood at every opportunity, which gets really old really fast. Violence, movie monsters, gore, accidents resulting in injuries, a couple jump-scares, claustrophobia, heights, disorientation, caves. Definitely an R.

For a spoiler-filled in-depth article on the theme of women’s bodies and cave metaphors, see Bitch Flicks‘ review.

Available for rental/purchase on Amazon Prime and iTunes, but not on streaming services at the moment.

Spoilers

*There is one man in the film but he does not go into the cave with them and has about 10 minutes of screen-time.

This is actually an instance of a male character getting fridged to further the plot and create a tragic backstory for a female character. Sarah’s husband Paul, who is having an affair with Juno, dies with their daughter in a car accident at the beginning of the film. Sarah’s paranoia in the cave and her relationship with Juno stem from her trauma.