The Cave (2005)

Some films arrive carrying the weight of a cultural moment. The Cave arrives carrying a claw. Bruce Hunt's 2005 creature feature deposits a team of cave divers into a Romanian cave system, kills them one by one, and departs without having said anything at all. It was released the same year as The Descent and has spent two decades being measured against it unfavorably, the sort of fate that befell many productions in 2005. The sets are handsome. The creatures are not. Critics at the time noted the cliches, the thin characters, the implausible logistics of an underwater expedition staffed largely by people who appear to have met each other that morning.

The cast is diverse in the way a 2005 ensemble often was, which is to say incidentally. Morris Chestnut plays a survival expert, Daniel Dae Kim plays a cameraman, and neither role invites a single word about race, identity, or the world outside the cave. Lena Headey is a scientist and Piper Perabo is a rock climber, and the film treats both as ordinary members of a doomed party. There is no argument being made about gender here, no thesis about who gets to hold the sonar equipment. The film simply assigns competencies and then drowns them.

The film leaves behind a picture of unusual ideological emptiness. No corporation is indicted, no ecosystem is mourned, no historical wrong is excavated alongside the fossils. The cave is a cave. The monster is a monster. Kathryn's mutated eyes in the final shot suggest a sequel that never came, which may be the most honest thing about the whole enterprise. It is a bad film, and it is a bad film without a message, which at least spares us the sermon.