Let me show you something that got me really excited a few months ago:
Fuck yeah! Look at that kick-ass poster! Great title, even a great tagline. Then I found out that As Above, So Below was about a group venturing into the Paris Catacombs to find the legendary alchemist Nicholas Fremel’s fabled Philosopher’s Stone – a summer horror movie based around a practitioner of a pretty obscure school of learning? Sign me right up!
Unfortunately, premise is one of the few things that As Above gets right. First of all, it’s a found-footage movie because huh? There is zero reason for that approach here. The found-footage tactic worked in The Blair Witch Project, Chronicle, and the first Paranormal Activity, but we have long since hit our point of dimishing returns and the gimmick just feels dated and hackneyed.
The biggest problem the movie faces is with its main character Scarlett Marlowe. She is a professor at University College in London, has two PhDs, a Master’s, is fluent in six languages (including two dead ones!), and has a black belt in Krav Maga. So, what the fuck? It’s estimated that any skill takes around 10,000 hours to master, so I guess she’s had 100,000 free hours to kill. Perdita Weeks plays Scarlett as bossy and somewhat condescending, which would be annoying enough as it is, but As Above insists on making her right all the time. She is never, ever wrong, and the film basically acts as an apologist for her.
Scarlett heads down into the Catacombs with George (Mad Men‘s Ben Feldman), who’s the type of guy who breaks into the Notre Dame Cathedral to fix its clock, and also speaks Aramaic, because everyone in As Above, So Below is amazing. He’s reluctant to go with Scarlett, because last time they did a job he ended up in A TURKISH PRISON. I can’t stress that enough. A TURKISH PRISON, GUYS. Moreover, his brother DROWNED IN A CAVE, and Scarlett gives 0% of a fuck about this, as she keeps cajoling him into joining her, and telling everyone else “He’s coming with me.” What a bitch.
They’re joined by Papillon, Zed, and Souxie, a trio of cave explorers, as well as Benji, who’s making a documentary about Scarlett (?). If you’ve seen a movie like this before – and I guarantee you have – you’ll know that most of these people are just here to die. And they do, but in decidedly anticlimactic fashions.
As Above treats the audience to some suitably surreal visions in the Catacombs, such as an upright piano, a group of hooded and masked monks, and a car engulfed in flames that drags a character into it. And for as much as I complain about it, the found-footage angle lets us get a good sense of the claustrophobia inherent in an expedition like this. Unfortunately, for a film set in such a wonderful location for a horror film (corridors upon corridors of SKULLS!), As Above is pretty light on the scares.
The most impressive aspect of this film is the attention paid to the tenets and beliefs of alchemy. It’s rare to see a release like this embrace such an obscure concept, and As Above does a good job of making the concepts graspable to an audience who might be unfamiliar with them.
So it’s hard for me to be too mad at this film, if only for its embracing of alchemy and history as narrative fuel. As Above, So Below plays like a love letter to antiquity from director John Erick Dowdle (Quarantine, Devil), and for all its many faults – MANY – I have a soft spot in my heart for people who like weird bullshit as much as I do.
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