Beneath

The strong point of the movie "Beneath" is the fact that it doesn't unnecessarily use handheld camera, which is a good thing because there has been too much of it lately. Additionally, the dark environment is appropriately utilized. Only the jump scares are sometimes just too predictable, but it is true that handling the unexpected is something that almost nobody can do anymore, and there are very few of them. "Beneath" probably won't blow your mind, but among similarly themed movies, it is a fairly well-executed work. (09/16/2014)

The director of the awful sequel to 30 Days of Night has done a pretty good job, something I wasn’t expecting from him. Excellent proof that you shouldn’t immediately dismiss anyone. Beneath is a text-book example of survival horror, i.e. a film where a group of characters (as it’s typical, in an attractive natural setting like mountains or caves) fight for their lives, both against the external circumnstances or various villains, and against each other. Survival is a pretty gratifying sub-genre, when it’s well made it can deliver tension basically from beginning to end, and Beneath is well made. The setting of a caved-in coal mine feels dirty and claustrophobic, and when you remember news from different parts of the world about similar accidents, the plot feels quite credible. The execution is almost perfect and the actors are decent, but the script could have got a bit more attention: when the characters begin to hallucinate, the situation becomes quite unclear and now I can’t remember exactly what was the fate of each of the miners. It could also have gone a little deeper psychologically, there was potential for that. It would also have helped if the film was a purely masculine affair, like Carpenter’s The Thing, because focusing on the one female protagonist that by a screenwriting accident finds herself in the mine makes things a little predictable. And even though the story takes place in a spooky underground and the characters suffer from spooky images, rather than only scaring, the film holds the tension… which is somehow part of survival stories. But in spite of these quibbles, Beneath turned out to be an unexpectedly excellent survival movie, perhaps the best of its kind since The Decent. 8/10 (07/02/2014)