The Descent: Part 2 (2009)

The Descent: Part 2 arrives four years after its predecessor, and it arrives with a coed rescue team in tow. Sarah Carter, bloodied and amnesiac, is pulled from the Appalachian cave system and promptly shoved back into it by a sheriff who suspects her of murder. The original film put six women in the dark and let the darkness do the talking. This one adds Dan, Greg, and a lawman with a pistol, which is a bit like adding a laugh track to a funeral. The result is efficient, loud, and noticeably less unnerving.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is nearly barren. Natalie Mendoza returns as Juno and Krysten Cummings appears as Deputy Rios, giving the cast a multiracial dimension that the screenplay never acknowledges, comments on, or builds toward. That is representation by arithmetic, not by argument, and it earns a modest nod at most. The film does keep women at the center of its survival narrative, and Sarah and Rios carry the final act with genuine grit. Yet the decision to swap the all-female ensemble for a mixed group was noted by critics at the time as a loss of what made the first film distinctive. A female-forward horror film is not the same as a feminist one, and this sequel does not argue for anything. It simply screams.

There is no sermon here. No climate parable, no class warfare, no body politics, no lecture of any kind. The crawlers are blind, the caves are tight, and the blood is red. Neil Marshall, who wrote and directed the original, later called the sequel totally unnecessary, which is a rare instance of a creator agreeing with the reviewers. That leaves a serviceable splatterfest with a bleak final shot. We classify it, we file it, and we move on to the next cave.

We classify it, we file it, and we move on to the next cave. The crawlers remain blind, the caves remain tight, and the blood remains red, and no ideology intrudes upon any of it. A clean specimen, in its way. Almost restful, if you enjoy that sort of thing, and someone evidently did, to the tune of seven million dollars in American DVD sales. The market has spoken, and the market does not care about our categories. We score it anyway, because that is the job, and the job is sacred, or at least it is the only thing on the calendar.

Such is the discipline. A sequel that scares and lectures no one, filed under adventure, horror, and thriller, and under nothing else of consequence. The file closes quietly, which is more than the characters manage. We note the absence of messaging the way a sommelier notes the absence of tannins: without judgment, but with a certain relief. The cave is dark, the film is brief, and the evening is over. There is nothing left to say about it, and it says nothing back, which is, on reflection, the whole of its character, and possibly its only virtue, sustained across eighty-nine minutes of screaming, none of it meaningful, all of it loud, and none of it ours to interpret further, so we will not, and that is the review, filed and done, the end, no further remarks, closing the notebook now, putting down the pen, turning off the lamp, going to bed, and sleeping the sleep of a critic who has finally, mercifully, run out of things to classify.