Sanctum (2011)

Sanctum arrives in 2011 with a James Cameron imprimatur, a 3D rig salvaged from Avatar, and a screenplay about people drowning in a flooded cave system beneath Papua New Guinea. It is a survival thriller of the old school, and it has no interest whatsoever in the moral instruction of its audience. The setting is a real place with a real colonial history and a real indigenous population. The film uses it as a wet, dark room. Local characters appear as guides and bearers, given names like Luko, and then they are killed by rocks. No comment is offered. None is sought.

The cast is a wall of white Australian faces, and the women exist to suffer hypothermia in a wet suit they declined to wear, or to hang by their hair above a chasm until the hair gives out. Victoria's death is staged as a cautionary tale about vanity in the cold. The film does not pause to interrogate this. It simply moves to the next corpse. Frank drowns his own son's friend out of mercy and later asks his son to return the favor. Carl, the financier, is unlikeable in the way that men with money are unlikeable in disaster movies, which is to say the film notices his wealth and declines to build a theory around it.

There is a cyclone, and it is weather, not a warning. There is a real 1988 expedition behind the story, and the film does not revise a single fact of it for ideological convenience. The result is a lean, grim, competently photographed exercise in drowning, and in the current taxonomy it registers as a zero across every available axis. This is not a criticism. It is a classification. The film wants nothing from us but our attention, and it barely gets that.