"The worst thing that could have happened to you has already happened, and you're still here."
A group of women go on a cave diving trip in attempt to rebuild their bonds after one of them suffered a horrific tragedy that splintered the group, losing her husband and child in a car accident. This is a trip about friendship and healing, but things are already bad. And from the moment the movie starts, they only get worse. And worse. And worse.
This is one of my favorite movies of all time. You start out from a place of grief, and that situation, learning how to move forward from that, is enough for one movie. And then you have the group of friends reunited for a cave dive, and that turns into a horror movie when the darkness and claustrophobia sets in as they become stuck, without knowing if there's even a way out, and at that point, the movie is genuinely terrifying. And THEN the monsters show up.
I will never forget realizing, as I was watching this for the first time, at home and on DVD when it first came out, that the moment early on in which Sarah gets stuck as part of the cave collapses was the most tense I had ever felt watching a movie. But having read the Fangoria cover story, I knew what the movie was about, and I knew what the monsters were. That moment, of suddenly realizing my heart was pounding out of my chest and we hadn’t even gotten to the monsters yet, is something that will stay with me forever.
What a treat it is to have a film so intense before it even arrives at the thing it's becoming. The survival horror that ensues from there is so perfect because these characters are already on edge and everything that happens is still based entirely on these six women and they're relationships, the strengths of which get repeatedly tested until they sometimes break. This is so many movies at once and yet it's never messy, because it's a singular story that just evolves and caves in and goes deeper, with a razor sharp through line about a woman simply trying to climb her way out of the pit that life has made for her.