Cave People: AS ABOVE, SO BELOW

A good horror movie could be made out of the catacombs beneath Paris, but As Above, So Below is not that movie. It descends into the real underground cemetery where, since 1810 or so, there really are orderly piles of human remains from the 6 million bodies placed there when the burial grounds closer to the surface got too crowded. I can say from first hand experience that it is creepy down there, dark, quiet, and filled with stacks of skulls and femurs of long-dead Parisians. The emergency exit sign is merely a green arrow pointing backwards from whence you came. There’s plenty of real eeriness to be found, so the movie’s intention to add a dusting of supernatural disorientation seems foolproof. But, boy, was I wrong. Director John Erick Dowdle, from a screenplay co-written with his brother Drew, has found a great location and in it stages almost nothing worth caring about.

The threadbare plot involves nothing characters and skimpy scares. It’s a found footage contraption that follows a young urban archeologist (Perdita Weeks) who wants to finish her late father’s search for Nicolas Flamel’s legendary Philosopher’s Stone, the exact same MacGuffin put to good use in the first Harry Potter. Suspecting it is located hundreds of feet below Flamel’s grave, she gets a cameraman (Edwin Hodge), an ex-colleague (Ben Feldman), and a trio of twentysomething French kids (François Civil, Marion Lambert, and Ali Marhyar) who love to explore the tunnels and caves just beyond the catacombs open to the public. We go below the city with the group, wobbling our way down narrow passageways, past tour guides, past thrill seekers, past cultists, until they’re well and truly lost. Along the way, they see weird visions and hear things that shouldn’t be. A phone rings. A baby cries. A piano sits half buried in a wall. Creepy.

It’s unfortunate that the whole scavenger hunt is visually unpleasant, with some of the queasiest shaky cam I’ve ever seen. At least that makes it marginally more believable than usual that the characters themselves are grabbing the shots on the fly. It’s entirely incomprehensible the further it goes. I have no clue what happened most of the time. They go in circles, fall down holes, splash through shallow water, find mildly unsettling befuddlement, and repeat it all over again. What do they find? How do the survivors escape? It’s hard to say. The scarier things get for the characters, the wilder the camerawork. The most effective scene is the most still, a claustrophobic moment with a pile of bones filling half the screen and a wall dominating the other, while a character stuck between them hyperventilates.

At some points, though, what’s appearing on the screen is practically experimental, building what is ostensibly a dumb narrative film out of blurry moving colors, flashing lights, half-glimpsed human figures, sudden jolts, shouts, and sound design that sounds like a cave in at the Foley studio. It is often said that the art of restraint makes for the best horror, when audiences can fill in gaps and summon up the dread of what might be around the next dark corner. And it is true that not seeing something scary or catching only a glimpse can be powerfully unsettling. But here when a character screams, “Did you see that?!”, the only possible answer is, “No.” I was never scared, only slightly nauseated by all the wobbling camerawork.

It’s a totally empty genre exercise that has absolutely nothing going on thematically or in its characterizations. There’s only the faintest glimmer of local color to the Parisian locales and supporting cast. Why bother going to Paris if you’re going to bury it under the ugliest, cheapest filming style? And most of the time, you can’t even tell they’re supposed to be in the catacombs. They’re panicking their way through anonymous dark rooms. Worst of all, it’s just not scary. The blank characters continually descend through a maze of bones and limestone as the movie whips itself into a nonsensical visual mess that fails to connect with the genuine claustrophobic creepiness that actually exists in its chosen location. Unlike Dowdle's minor elevator-set horror fun in Devil, his previous film, As Above, So Below totally squanders its close-quarters potential.

In the Details: DEVIL

The world of Devil is in trouble right from the opening frames. Gliding gray establishing shots of Philadelphia create an immediate sense of unease just by being upside down. The world is off-kilter. Something is very wrong. Narration from a skyscraper’s superstitious security guard (Jacob Vargas) tells us that the Devil can torment the damned while they still live by entering our world through spaces created by suicides. No sooner than the frame reorients itself, a person jumps out of one of the building’s high windows.

Soon after the policeman with a tragic past (Chris Messina) shows up to investigate, the real trouble starts. An elevator mysteriously breaks down leaving five people stuck suspended over twenty stories high. One is a sleazy mattress salesman (Geoffrey Arend). Another (Bokeem Woodbine) is one of the building’s security team, though it’s unfortunately only his second day. Also along for the ride are a spooked young woman (Bojana Novakovic), a suspicious elderly lady (Jenny O’Hara), and a guy with a sketchy beard of stubble (Logan Marshall-Green).

The cast remains stuck there for most of the movie as the plot unravels like Irwin Allen by way of Rod Serling. They aren’t exactly the most compelling bunch of characters, but the way they inevitably turn on each other is tensely exciting. The script by Brian Nelson, from a story concept by M. Night Shyamalan, is efficient, wrapping the whole thing up in a little less than 80 minutes. It turns out the deaths, and ratchets up the suspense, like clockwork. The lights go out. We hear ominous noises, punctuated by shouts and screams and various other sorts of exclamations. When the lights flicker back to life, there is one less person alive in that elevator. Who is the murderer? Spoiler alert: the answer is in the title.

The unconvincing pseudo-religious premise, which had me hopelessly wishing a third-act twist would reveal a real-world solution to the killings, is worn a little too heavily. But director John Erick Dowdle makes sure the proceedings move along quickly and creepily. The cinematography by the great Tak Fujimoto turns out surprisingly varied images, cannily exploiting claustrophobia and acrophobia. The movie has a strong sense of both confinement and extreme height that keeps the sense of danger omnipresent. I was much more unnerved by the feeling of being stuck in an elevator and the potential of a sudden drop than I was by any of the supernatural goofiness that adorns the plot.

The final moments overreach, as do various moments throughout the movie that border on just plain silly. A security guard talks about how everything in the building is going wrong this day and punctuates this by tossing a piece of toast in the air. It lands jelly side down. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t find wasted toast particularly frightening.

What I do find frightening is how effectively this movie worked on me. It’s silly and inessential, but I can’t deny that it had me shivering for more or less the entire time. Fujimoto’s images got under my skin. Dowdle’s brisk direction of Nelson’s thin script moves along swiftly and keeps things agreeably eerie. This is a dumb little suspenseful horror movie that’s sheer simplicity works.