Sarah had lost everything. Right away as the film began, her husband and daughter are tragically killed in a car accident, leaving Sarah alive to pick up the rest of the pieces as she tries to grapple with what all just happened. The opening to the movie was tragic and propels our protagonist into an intense struggle with anger and acceptance as she tries to move on with her life despite the horrific circumstances.  Her friends all support her, and together they enjoy doing adrenaline-rushing activities like white-water rafting and extreme hiking to pass time as well as forget their personal problems. However, this time around her friends have a different idea: to get Sarah’s mind off her trauma, they decide to explore an inhabited cave. Their hopes are that the thrill of new discovery and staking their names to the conquering of the cave will give Sarah new motivation to live out her life without being dragged down by her grief. Reluctantly, Sarah tags along as the team prepares for this new cave expedition, but we see Sarah is obviously still traumatized from the past events. As they descend into the cave, I couldn’t help but think this is an intentional metaphor for them descending into Sarah’s grief, together as a band of friends. Grief is a raw, vulnerable emotion that is complex and intricate, a long road that winds on and on. As the group of friends begin to realize that this cave is more than they bargained for, we are reminded that grief can change us in to people we may never recognize again. It can change us into monsters.

I think the allegorical element of this film was perhaps the most important and one of the most illuminating aspects. Grief is what caused Sarah to descend into the cave as she tries to escape her trauma, but only to realize that she is descending into the very mouth from where grief creeps out from. When they first start their expedition in the cave, Sarah tries to crawl through a tight tube of rocks and gets compressed so tight that she can’t move any further. Her friend Beth coaches her through untangling herself, basically telling her to face her fears head on and not to look back. Sarah manages to escape with Beth’s help, but facing her trauma and grief blinded by confusion and anger only makes her descend farther in to its dark, murky depths.

Quickly into the film, we see that the group of friends is in fact not alone in the cave: there are creatures hiding in the shadows watching them, snarling quietly as they creep unseen, waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike. As members of the expedition group get picked off one by one, the ones who are left band together to survive, but it comes at a cost. When one member accidentally kills another out of self-defense, they turn on each other. This part of the film was hard to watch, but also very allegorical in showing how Sarah descended farther and farther in to anger as the answer for her sorrow, anger as the sole comforter and sole destroyer.  Slowly, we watch as she becomes consumed with rage and kills a bunch of the cave-dwelling creatures single-handedly as she screams in agony.

Grief is a terrible feeling, but this film shows that when you let anger take hold you can become someone else entirely, someone unrecognizable. The most apparent scene showing this is towards the end of the film where Sarah and her friend Juno, her closest friend out of the group, are the only survivors left and are trying to find an exit from the cave, with the cave-dwellers crawling behind them in hungry pursuit. At the final moment of Sarah’s blinding anger, she realizes that Juno is the one who accidentally killed her friend Beth and in a flash of response, fatally wounds her and leaves her to be surrounded by the creatures. Sarah is the lone survivor who escapes the cave that day, but if we look at the film allegorically, she never truly escaped her grief. She let it become the blood flowing through her veins, and it drove her to madness in the end. Though Sarah manages to survive, driving away from the cave at top speed, we as the audience have a very unsettling feeling that she never will truly escape the turmoil inside her. Throughout the film, the grief manifests into a pale, snarling creature that drives her to blinding rage, and in this raw emotion of redness, Sarah placed all her hope. 

The Descent is a tragic, unsettling look at how humans experience grief and how some, to numb its pain, replace it with blinding rage and become someone completely unrecognizable in the process. Despite it being a thrilling film, I couldn’t help but also feel extremely disheartened at the film’s message. Grief is a complicated, intricate topic and one avenue is where grief affect someone very negatively, as depicted in the movie. However, I feel that if there was some element of hope in this film, some redemptive quality that perhaps gave a different alternative to the protagonist’s actions, then the audience wouldn’t be left feeling empty after watching it. This film isn’t a happy one, and the protagonist chooses to go down a dark and tumultuous path, but it would have made the story more well-rounded if she at least caught sight of the glimmer of hope, no matter how faint it may have been. Instead, we are dragged through the pits of hell along with her, eternal separation from any hope at all. The Descent is a depressing movie that does a thorough job in allegorical explanation of grief, but one that is missing the important element of hope that is always present, no matter how dark the situation may be.