“All European legends have sad endings.”
I’m going to start describing a movie, and I have a good feeling that you’re going to think I’m talking about The Descent. I want to assure you that, no, this is a different movie entirely. Yes, it’s about a group of people entering an unexplored cave filled with monst – no, I see you nodding your head, saying, “Yeah, that’s The Descent.” Just stick with me here. I’m actually talking about The Cave, a classic victim of parallel movie releasing, to be filed alongside Deep Impact and Friends With Benefits. This film had the misfortune to be released too close to The Descent, which unfortunately for The Cave is a vastly superior movie.
This has actually been on my to-watch list for a while. For whatever reason, I remember seeing the posters for this at the Burbank AMC and liking the tagline (“Below heaven lies hell, below hell lies…THE CAVE”). And to the film’s credit, it gets off to a decent start. We open in Romania, around 1975, and the cinematography is pleasingly gritty. It gives off a rough, tactile feel, and if nothing else you can tell that The Cave was shot on film. We’re in the Carpathian mountains – home of Dracula, not that that’s relevant – with a group of tomb raiders looking to ransack a mountainside church. In the church they find a cellar, walled with horrific carvings, and under the cellar they find a cave.
Cut to thirty years later and we meet our crew of (mostly bland) cave divers. They have a few characteristics spread thinly between them: Strode is Australian, Tyler is reckless, Briggs is arrogant, Jack is bland, and Top is named Top. Oh, and Charlie is the girl one. I hope that’s enough to get you hooked, because that’s all The Cave will give you. They get summoned to Romania by Dr. Nicholai, and the film never makes it clear if Nicholai is his first or last name. In Romania they meet Dr. Katherine Jennings, played ably by Lena Headey, and I’ll say it here: Headey is actually quite good in this movie. That’s not notable for Headey, who’s just terrific in general, but most everyone here seems to be content phoning it in. Not Headey. She has a perfect voice for her character, which helps, given that she’s saddled with mostly expository dialogue. She runs with it, though, and sometimes it’s nice to hear someone with a clipped British accent explain something coolly and confidently.
To the surprise of no one who’s ever seen a movie, the cave collapses and the crew only has one way out: through. They’re truly isolated, as the cave is estimated to be 90 miles long, and no one is expecting them to resurface for 12 days, and they definitely don’t expect them to come out the way they came in. Here’s where we see this crew of hot dogs at their steeliest, by which I mean these people take everything in stride. It’s one thing to be level-headed, but when you’re confronted with evolutionary monstrosities – translucent scorpions, piranha/eel hybrids, some kind of mole rat with webbed feet – it’s okay to be, I don’t know, at least a little concerned. The problem is that Jack and Tyler shoulder most of the dramatic heavy lifting. Cole Hauser is bland as Jack, but Eddie Cibrian is flat-out nonexistent as Tyler (that’s what happens when you cast some more famous for having an affair than for acting).
The one-note characterizations are so baked into the scripts – and the ensemble’s largely lackluster performance – that at no point does The Cave reach the emotional heights of The Descent (I promise not to keep comparing the two). This is most obvious in the character of Briggs. He’s shown to be arrogant and antagonistic towards Tyler, even though Tyler is admittedly the better diver, which begs the question: why on earth would you hire someone like this? Walk me through your thought process, Jack. “I’m going to go explore an unknown, massive cave, I better bring this arrogant prick who constantly undermines me and picks on my brother.” These are the things I shouldn’t be thinking about in a horror movie. The problem with ultra-capable characters in horror movies is that they don’t make dumb decisions, and when everyone thinks rationally, you wind up in Abed’s horror story from Community.
To be fair, while The Cave does indulge in some claustrophobic environments, it seems more suited to freak out those who suffer from megalophobia: the cave is massive and labyrinthine. And the underwater cinematography is beautiful. (In a classy move, the underwater crew is acknowledged in the opening credits.) There’s a nice sense of verisimilitude in the use of technology; cave diving equipment isn’t something we’re used to seeing on screen. Lived-in details like that help ground the movie (“1 in 14,” they remind each other, referring to the number of cave divers who die every year).
So: the creatures. Obviously there are creatures involved, but credit where it’s due, there’s a decent twist. Our crew isn’t bedeviled by a primitive race of monsters, but rather evolved versions of the previous explorers, mutated beyond humanity by the cave-dwelling parasite (Katherine intones, as only Lena Headey can, “They weren’t eaten by the creatures; they are the creatures”). This bit of originality makes up for the underwhelming design of the creatures, which basically look like Xenomorphs with bat wings. At one point, Charlie cries “They freakin’ fly!” which has an unfortunate similarity to one of the worst moments in Star Wars. Not the film’s fault, but still annoying.
The Cave ends about how you’d expect, replete with the obvious devolution of Katherine from capable woman to damsel in distress (it was 2005, what do you expect). Katherine ends up with the parasite inside her and leaves to go infect the world. It’s nicely bleak – as is the rest of the film; very little quips to be found here – but at this point who cares. Look, I know I said I’d stop comparing The Cave to The Descent, but it’s inevitable. A perfect version of this movie already exists, is what I’m trying to say, and I think you know what I mean.
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