DEAD AND BURIED

Reviewed - The Descent: The dark Descent is a gripping horror thriller that subverts the genre's stale rules, writes Donald Clarke

Neil Marshall's brilliant follow-up to - and refinement of - his 2002 werewolf adventure, Dog Soldiers, might fairly be described as a supreme piece of genre film-making. But in its unpretentious way, The Descent sets about defying some recently formed, deeply unwelcome horror orthodoxies.

We have been led to believe such films' target audience, with its goldfish attention span, needs the monster to emerge in the first reel and thereafter escalate its viscera-chewing to apocalyptic levels; but Marshall's pale, slimy troglodytes don't make an appearance for a good 45 minutes, and the picture is all the more tense as a result. Women in contemporary horror films must, it is said, be promiscuous victims, plucky babysitters or - take a bow, Linda Hamilton and Sigourney Weaver - existential cowgirls; the female cavers in The Descent have convincingly varied personalities which appear to have been devised with some purpose other than helping us guess the order in which the beheadings will take place. It would be a crime to reveal the other, more ancient narrative dicta that are disobeyed in the picture's final few minutes.

Aware that his audience will have to distinguish between various unfamiliar actors in pitch darkness, Marshall cannily draws his cast from a variety of nations. Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) is Scottish and depressed. Juno (Natalie Mendoza) is American and aggressive. Loud, spirited Holly (Nora-Jane Noone from The Magdalene Sisters) has somehow managed to gain experience as a base jumper in the low-rise environs of Galway.

Having ended last year's white-water adventure in unhappy circumstances, the girls elect to spend their annual vacation potholing in the Appalachians. Long before the cannibalistic pseudo-humans attack, the cavers have faced startled bats, falling boulders, claustrophobic tunnels and the alarming realisation that there may be no way out.

It's a neat premise that allows the director to awaken any number of primal fears in the viewer. The scenario does, however, offer challenges. Last year's Alien vs Predator demonstrated too clearly that setting a horror film in the dark can cause more bewilderment than unease. But Marshall, shooting solely with the cavers' own light sources, reveals just enough to further the plot without ever dispersing the ominous murk. Horror enthusiasts who felt that Dog Soldiers might be a lucky one-off will be delighted to see Marshall demonstrate such a sure grasp of the dynamics of tension.

Featuring unforced allusions to such classics as Carrie, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and - rather surprisingly - Don't Look Now, The Descent demonstrates there is a future for the British horror film that does not involve a return to the baroque cosiness of Hammer. Revoltingly entertaining stuff.