The Pyramid (2014)

The Pyramid, released in 2014, carries the distinction of being one of that year's most thoroughly disliked films: a found-footage creature feature in which an archaeological team descends into a buried three-sided pyramid and is methodically devoured by Anubis and a supporting cast of emaciated feline things. Grégory Levasseur directs with the confidence of a man who has watched a great many better movies, and the result earned a 13 percent approval rating and a place on several worst-of lists. It is, in the grand tradition of tomb-raiding cinema, a film about people who should have stayed home.

For those of us who maintain ledgers of cultural consciousness, the picture is a barren site. The leads are white American archaeologists, with Egyptian performers filling the soldier, worker, and taxi driver roles that the location demands and nothing more. The setting supplies non-white faces without ever commenting on race, which leaves racial consciousness at a flat zero. There is no LGBTQ presence, no environmental sermon, no critique of the funding bodies that bankrolled the expedition, and no engagement with body image. The desert is not a metaphor for anything. It is simply hot and full of monsters.

A woman survives to the final reel and does stab the jackal god before the screen goes black, but that is the standard arithmetic of slasher cinema, not a statement of any kind. Egyptian mythology is strip-mined for monster designs and hieroglyphic exposition, an act of genre appropriation with no ideological ambition behind it. No character pauses to explain the moral of the story. No lesson is delivered, and nobody learns anything except that pyramids are best admired from a distance. The film's cultural footprint is close to nothing, and it is at minimum honest about its ambitions, which appear to have been showing a large dog eating a man's heart. There are worse ways to spend eighty-nine minutes. Not many.