So we spent Halloween watching horror movies, which mostly served to illustrate to me what a large genre “horror” is. I’ve long said that I don’t really like horror movies, and I no longer think that’s really true — it’s not my preferred genre, for sure, but there’s a lot of horror stuff out there that I’ve come to really appreciate.

But The Descent, the first movie we watched, is the kind of horror movie that I think of when I say that I don’t like horror, because it is just so relentlessly and deeply unpleasant. You start off the backstory with a character having her husband and young daughter killed gruesomely and horribly in a freak accident; then we get to the main story a year later, where she’s dealing with that trauma and also facing fresh new trauma in the form of a caving expedition gone horribly wrong, in ways that cause gruesome physical pain (including the ever popular “snapped bone poking out of leg” augh), horrific emotional pain, and oh yeah also there are gollums that are hunting them in the claustrophobic dark.

This is a movie that does a wonderful job of making you feel what it would be like to be in the most horrible situation imaginable, but… I don’t want to feel that. So yeah, well-crafted movie for the most part, but just extremely not for me.

Beyond that personal taste, I do have one quibble with it, which is that, at the end… hold up, spoiler cut here…

Spoilers

…the protagonist flat-out murders one of her friends; the movie is framing this as a kind of justified revenge/self-defense thing, but… it’s not? Yes, the friend got them into danger via lying, but it was well-intentioned (though very, very stupid) lies; yes, the friend had an affair with her husband before his death, but that doesn’t justify murder. So the only thing that the friend might be plausibly murderable for is having accidentally killed another of their friends — but that was a legit accident, a kind of friendly fire in the middle of a confused melee in the dark. And it’s pretty clear that the protagonist is mostly thinking about the cheating when she kills her friend angrily and unnecessarily.

Anyway, long story short is that the “happy ending” involves a woman who was already barely dealing with the trauma of losing her family now also having to deal with a) having lost all her friends, b) having horrific memories of nightmarish scenarios to flash back to, and c) having murdered a friend in a fit of rage, in a way that she will probably find hard to forgive herself for in the light of day.

There’s a sequel, but if it is doing anything other than using this movie as a springboard for exploring gollum society, I can’t imagine what a hellspring of wretchedness it would be from the very first frame.