"The Way Out was the Wrong Turn: Going back down on The Descent 2" by Robert Meyer Burnett

When I wrote about David Twohy’s The Arrival in this space recently, I talked about the concept of watching films at scale. Put simply, by this I mean taking into account the magnitude of a film’s production and budget, as well as its intended purpose and vibe, when evaluating it.

Said differently: to view at scale is to align our expectations as viewers with the realities of a filmmaker’s means. This simple mental adjustment can significantly enhance a movie-watching experience, not only with its immediate emotional impact, but also its overall appreciation. It’s an invisible handshake with great dividends.

And the beautiful thing is that this act, fundamentally one of courtesy, transfers to the creative process.

Viewing at scale, in other words, can itself be scaled to different situations.

Like, say, creating a movie.

Filmmakers who, for one reason or another, accept the challenge of making sequels to iconic movies, more often than not succeed when they go about their work thinking about it at scale.

Richard Franklin, for example, faced the unenviable task of directing Psycho II twenty-three years after Alfred Hitchcock’s legendary picture. Armed with a savvy screenplay by Tom Holland, and eliciting another strong but subtly different, more sympathetic performance from Anthony Perkins, Franklin crafted a smart '80s horror-tinged thriller that expanded Norman Bates’ story while preserving key tonal elements of the original movie. It’s clear that Franklin and Holland weren’t going up against Psycho: their mission statement was to make Psycho II as enjoyable as possible on its own terms, even while acknowledging that a sizable portion of those words were indebted to Psycho’s vocabulary.

For a wilder example, think of Walter Murch tackling a sequel to Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz forty-six years after the MGM Technicolor musical forged cinematic history. Murch replaced unadulterated whimsy with a darker, more eerie tone that created an alternate Oz. Surely, Murch knew that Return to Oz wouldn’t gain the mainstream affection of the original. He wasn’t aiming for that. And his movie is at least a qualified success, garnering enough of a cult following to make it a delightful gag in Kyle Balda’s brilliant The Sheep Detectives.

Which brings us to Jon Harris, who took it upon himself to continue the legacy of Neil Marshall’s hard-hitting The Descent four years after the original.

Let me be frank. There are only a handful of horror films I’ve seen over the course of my life that fundamentally changed the way I think about the genre, and Marshall’s The Descent is one of them.

I consider it not simply a great creature feature, but a true horror classic. Why? Because it understood that the monsters were not the story, but an inevitable consequence of it.

Great horror is built from the people who inhabit the stories, not the threats they face. Take away the characters and Freddy Krueger is just a guy with knives on his fingers, the Xenomorph’s just a tall dude in a slimy suit, and Bruce the Shark is a malfunctioning animatronic fish.

Horror’s power to cast a spell over audiences doesn’t just come from gory imagery and deftly delivered jump scares. It’s the fate of the characters an audience comes to know and love that remains in the imagination long after the last scream for mercy or drop of blood has curdled in our memories.

Neil Marshall understood this. The Descent proves it.

It’s evident from the screenplay for The Descent: Part 2 by James McCarthy, J Blakeson, and James Watkins that they weren’t trying to outdo the first movie in, pun intended, psychological depth. Instead, they focus their energy on combining splatter thrills with well-managed tension while maximizing claustrophobic potential.

In a late moment in The Descent: Part 2, Sarah Carter, the lone credited survivor of the first film, finds herself handcuffed to a man dangling over a fatal drop, while another character is ordered to hack through his wrist before gravity finishes the job.

It’s grisly, frantic, and excitingly staged.

A great example of the departments in which The Descent: Part 2 delivers the goods.

For a point of reference, think of Toby Wilkins’ Splinter (2008), which features parasitic spiky infection creatures. It’s mainly about survival and body horror; the character arcs are, let’s just say, modest. But the strong practical/CG hybrid creature concept and escalating stakes keep its tight runtime gripping even without much thematic layering.

John Gulager’s earlier Feast (2005) is another structural cousin in terms of being confined to mostly a single location and emphasizing gonzo carnage. If anything, this one gleefully leans into a sillier, pulpier tone.

Also relevant here is Carter Smith’s The Ruins (2008). Again, an isolated, hostile environment and a nonhuman antagonist, in this case the lethal vines organism.

How do bodies and minds break under pressure? That’s a question all these movies ask and answer, with varying degrees of gusto.

It may not be the most sophisticated quandary horror is capable of framing up, but it’s nevertheless a defensible one.

These flicks, along with The Descent: Part 2, are examples of craft-and-concept horror. No major themes, no deep soul-searching. Limited locations, brutally clear stakes, and an emphasis on visceral set pieces over subtext.

Unambitious, perhaps, but respectable.

Now, let me get back to Sarah Carter. In The Descent’s original British release, Sarah doesn’t escape the cave. Her cathartic drive into the daylight evokes An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge: it’s shockingly revealed as her dying fantasy before the film returns her to the darkness, where she sits alone as her torch burns low, dreaming of her daughter’s birthday cake radiating softly before her.

No escape. No catharsis. Just the knowledge that Sarah was never going home. It wasn’t simply one of the bleakest endings I’d ever seen; it was also one of the most honest. That ending hurt, because it makes the point that Sarah never escapes the tunnels because she never escapes her grief. The physical and emotional labyrinths are inseparable.

American audiences, however, saw a different ending after preview screenings convinced the studio that Marshall’s conclusion was simply too bleak. In the Yank cut, Sarah makes it back to her truck. The final shock became a brief vision of Juno in the passenger seat before the credits.

Neither ending is inherently illegitimate. Neil Marshall acknowledged that both versions resolve the story differently. They’re two fundamentally different conclusions to the same emotional journey.

The Descent: Part 2 confirms the American ending. Sarah didn’t die. She emerges from the cave two days later, alive and covered in blood, but suffering from selective amnesia.

This allows the film to trade in the psychological devastation of the British ending as well, to a degree. Sarah behaves as though she never truly escaped, yet she physically exists, so another expedition can descend into the tunnels. The film brokers an uneasy agreement between the accessibility of one ending and the emotional seriousness of the other. Imperfect, but functional.

We also get the return of Juno’s character. Left mortally wounded by Sarah, Juno’s alive. This gives us some built-in dramatic tension.

There’s more to admire about The Descent: Part 2.

For instance, watching The Descent: Part 2, it’s clear that Jon Harris always knows exactly where he is. Harris edited the first film before making his feature directing debut here, and it shows. Any film set underground, especially horror films, can quickly turn into visual mush. Tunnel. Darkness. Flashlight. Somebody screams. Rinse. Repeat.

But Harris never loses me. Every tunnel, every ledge, every impossible squeeze through solid rock has a geography I can easily follow. I always understand where people are, which means I always understand what’s at stake. The sequence involving characters crossing a vast chasm while anchored to a corpse is genuinely thrilling, while another, built around remaining perfectly silent as the crawlers hunt by sound, not only predates the A Quiet Place franchise but also produces precisely the sort of primal tension the series does so well.

While the screenplay tries at times to turn Sarah into a Final Girl, Shauna Macdonald won’t let it. She plays Sarah as fundamentally broken, giving her a haunted physicality that transcends the writing. Macdonald makes it clear that Sarah’s still carrying the emotional wreckage of the first film. It’s a performance for which we should be thankful.

Krysten Cummings’ Deputy Rios is one of the sequel’s pleasant surprises. She’s allowed to become an actual person, a rarity in films preoccupied with body counts.

The creature effects remain impressively tactile, relying on practical makeup and prosthetics that still possess an unpleasant, almost biological realism.

David Julyan’s return as composer certainly enlivens the material, and provides welcome musical continuity textured with useful shades of remembered emotions.

The set pieces are also accomplished. There’s joy to be found in them there catacombs! The Descent: Part 2 delivers ninety minutes of bloody creature mayhem, orchestrated by a director who clearly knows what he’s doing behind the camera. It’s entertaining. And dare I say, there’s certainly more fun to be had.

Does all of this rival the emotional depths plumbed by The Descent? No. It’s not designed to. That’s not the scale we’re working at here. The blueprint isn’t as weighty.

When films get sequels, the necessity of expanding the world can tilt the scales in favor of iconography. Studios remember the mask, the claws, the cave, the spaceship, the killer, the monster. The intent becomes not to make a great film, but to extend the scaffolding of the previous one.

Classic movies are well built, from the ground up. The foundation, the walls, the roof. Horror is no exception.

The monster is always on the roof. That’s the part everybody notices. But the characters don’t live on the roof. They live in the house underneath it, hearing the scratching from above.

The Descent built the house first. Six women’s worth of grief, guilt, and betrayal, before it ever put the roof on. The Descent: Part 2 has the benefit of a roof already in place. It doesn’t do as much heavy lifting, because it’s adding a cupola, not trying to create a competing, rival building.

The Descent: Part 2 says, “We’re not going into grief territory. That’s been thoroughly unearthed. Instead we’re going to make the cave itself the main attraction.”

The crawlers matter not just because they’re monsters hiding in the darkness, but because they're the dead end of a journey from which it was unclear whether Sarah could escape. What remained on the surface to give her back what she’d already lost?

The Descent: Part 2 suggests that the answer might lie in returning to the place that confronted her with the very question.

It’s a compromise.

When you can’t move forward, you can typically at least step back. Regroup. Rethink. Try again.

Sometimes, that’s enough.