Unfortunately, this film did not live up the promise I found in my initial viewing of its trailer. While I find it cool that much of the film was actually shot in "off limits" parts of the Paris Catacombs, the sense of claustrophobia I was hoping to experience was never truly realized.
The movie does get some things right. It establishes its heroine, Scarlett (Perdita Weeks), well, showing her sneaking into Iran to uncover some archaeological evidence. This sets up her obsessive dedication to her work, and helps bypass the eternal problem in horror films--when the audience wonders: "Why is she doing that! She's so stupid!". After going into Iran, just about any extreme risk she could take wouldn't seem out of character. It's also a clever idea to have the character, on the hunt for the Philosopher's Stone, searching for more clues while she tells others around her what she already knows. This creates a more dynamic situation. Instead of droning on, force feeding the audience endless exposition, said exposition is provided while she is actively pursuing goals, making it go down much easier.
Soon Scarlett discovers that the stone is hidden in the Paris Catacombs, and she enters in search of it with her cameraman, a reluctant friend, and several local guides in tow. At this point all of the characters put small cameras on the front of their helmets, allowing the film to jump back and forth between everyone's point of view. This is also the point at which the film must follow through with its promise of "horror". It is here that it mostly fails.
There are a few "jump" scares and some moments of tension, but the film never reached the sense of unease I got seeing its trailer for the first time. It had been the idea of being stuck, unable to move, deep under ground that had struck a primal chord with me. Sadly there are few moments in the actual film when anyone is physically trapped. They're almost always moving forward in one direction or another. I also thought that the decision to make this a "found footage" film severely handicapped it. The few times when a character is actually struggling to get out of a tight space could have been much more effective in the hands of a capable cinematographer and editor. Having everything being shot from the characters' points of view really limited the types of shots the film could have. These various points of view were sometimes edited together so rapidly and nonsensically that it was difficult to tell what was going on. Not in a mysterious way (potentially good for this type of movie), but in a needlessly confusing way. In some cases "found footage" is an effective sub-genre, helping to get us deeper into the characters' world. In this case, they had a great setting (the catacombs) that could have been put to much better effect if the filmmakers had been able to compose each individual shot.
This film did a lot of things well early on, but a lack of truly frightening moments, combined with a less than ideal shooting style, keep it from standing out overall.
C
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