THE DARK BELOW (2015)

Studio:       Parade Deck Films
Director:    Douglas Schulze
Writer:       Douglas Schulze, Jonathan D’Ambrosio
Producer:  Douglas Schulze, Kurt Eli Mayry, Kathryn J. McDermott
Stars:     Lauren Shafer, David G.B. Brown, Veronica Cartwright

Review Score:

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Summary:

A desperate woman must find a way to survive after a dangerous killer traps her under ice in a freezing lake.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Serial killer Ben Torrance attacks his wife Rachel, outfits her in underwater gear, and submerges her beneath the ice in a freezing lake outside their home.

While struggling for air and looking for a way out, Rachel flashes back to first meeting Ben when he was her dive instructor. The couple eventually married, opened a dive shop together, and had a daughter named Grace. Rachel recalls sensing something dangerous about Ben after she and Grace interrupted him while he was attempting to drown a student. Suspicions grew when police came to the dive shop looking for a missing woman.

With Rachel underwater, Ben returns to the house to tend to Rachel’s mother Tess, who he previously knocked unconscious. Tess recovers and tries attacking Ben, but he subdues her.

Rachel makes it out of the water and manages to grab flippers for her feet. However, she has to return to the water to escape Ben when he comes back to the scene.

Rachel next flashes back to Ben emerging from the lake behind their house carrying an unconscious Grace. Suspecting Ben was involved in Grace’s near drowning, Tess refuses to allow Ben to see his daughter in the hospital. While cleaning up the dive shop later, Tess and Rachel confirm Ben is a serial killer when they discover a small box of severed body parts. They confront Ben with a gun, but that is when Ben overpowers both women and takes Rachel captive.

Suffering from severe hypothermia, Rachel escapes the water once again. Ben hunts her on the ice with a rifle. Rachel returns to the water to hide and loses a finger from frostbite.

Ben fires into the ice and is blinded by a spray of water and snow, which causes him to drop his gun into the lake. Rachel recovers the weapon and shoots Ben in his shoulder before Ben takes the gun back.

Ben fires wildly into the ice and water attempting to shoot Rachel. The gunfire weakens the ice and Ben falls in the lake.

Rachel climbs out of the water again. While Rachel recovers at a nearby oxygen tank, Ben emerges from behind and grabs her. Rachel finds a knife on the ground and stabs Ben.

Rachel recovers alongside her mother Tess at Grace’s bedside in the hospital. Grace finally comes out of her coma.

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Review:

Serial killer Ben has an unconventional (and wholly impractical, if we’re being honest) idea in mind for murdering his latest victim.  After capturing Rachel in her home, Ben dresses the woman in a wetsuit, straps a tank on her back, and drops her through a hole in the ice, leaving her to gradually drown in a frozen lake.

If Rachel remains submerged, cold water will eventually kill her.  If she dares to make her way back to the surface, Ben is certain to do the same.

Over the course of her frigid captivity, Rachel recalls events leading up to her hostage horror.  These flashbacks flesh out the mystery of who Ben and Rachel really are to one another, and why it is so critical that she make it out of the ice alive.

“The Dark Below” is a compact, claustrophobic thriller running along lines similar to the Ryan Reynolds movie “Buried.”  Sinking its hook with a compelling setup from the get go, “The Dark Below” doesn’t struggle to be intriguing, though it does struggle to expand that intrigue to feature length.

Rachel’s abduction is the first scene.  Being tied exclusively to a specific situation for the entire movie to work, the story can’t actually move forward until Ben finally puts her in the water, yet that doesn’t take place until the 10-minute mark.  ‘Boring’ isn’t an accurate term to describe plentiful scenes of prolonged exposition stretching the distance between plot points like this.  But one is inclined to look at the clock with a sigh and think, “get on with it” several times during the movie.

While ‘boring’ isn’t a fair descriptor, it would be fair to surmise that “The Dark Below” is a classic case of a solid setup better suited for a short.  The film runs only 70 minutes excluding credits, with a fair portion of that footage also stretched by slow motion.

There’s only so much that can be done with a premise primarily involving one barrier between two people.  The script finds this out firsthand by running out of imagination early, likely explaining why Rachel briefly escaping from the ice only to return to the water to hide is a beat repeated more than once.

Dialogue consists solely of one three-word sentence, making for an almost entirely wordless movie with an oddly atypical structure.  The sound side of things is covered instead by David Bateman’s music.  It’s a competent score, although like the movie’s concept, it seems better suited for some other format.  Bateman’s soundtrack is heavy with Philip Glass artistry and a choir-like vocalist whose operatic overtones are overdramatic for accentuating the action or inaction onscreen.  Stakes are high, but not as high as the notes she hits.

From its silent style of reverse reveal suspense, “The Dark Below” is clearly an artistic indie.  Its cinematic experiment isn’t always successful, though it usually remains interesting.  At a minimum, there is always admiration to be had for a small scope, low-budget production dependent on nighttime exteriors, snowy weather, and copious time spent with a camera underwater.

You know filmmakers and actors are seriously committed to their project when they choose undesirable conditions for shooting, and risk taking a unique approach to suspenseful storytelling.  They could easily have aimed for a more marketable movie that had them inside a single location or outside in the sun, but they deliberately didn’t.  That alone earns applause.

In need of more depth to its drama, “The Dark Below” is not the kind of thriller with constant chills forcing audiences to claw at their armrests while begging for more.  But it is an engaging effort overall, emerging as moderately memorable for both its premise and unorthodox presentation.

Review Score:  55

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