#274: Below
A deep dive into claustrophobia and paranoia
This review was originally posted to Twitter on June 13, 2020.
Initial release: October 11, 2002
Director: David Twohy
The early 2000s were a rough time for horror films, with several negative trends making some horror movies worse than they really deserved to be. And for all its good qualities, David Twohy’s Below is a good example of a somewhat smart little chiller marred by overuse of jumpscares.
We open in the Atlantic ocean, 1943. An American submarine has been tasked with rescuing survivors on a lifeboat — three Brits, one severely injured, and, crucially, another of them a woman, whose presence causes murmurs of possible bad luck among the men. While the sub is being hunted by a destroyer, a phonograph begins to play; it soon becomes clear that the severely injured Brit is actually a German prisoner of war, who is soon dispatched.
Everything seems fine, then… until the phonograph plays again.
As the film goes on, mysterious happenings increase in frequency. Strange noises are common enough on submarines; but less common are the odd coincidences, the spooky half-seen visions, and the dark secret held by three of the top officers regarding the death of the ship’s captain. For most of the film it’s never totally clear what’s really happening. Sabotage? A ghost? Or simply the claustrophobic confines of the sub, the stress of being hunted by the enemy, and the slow depletion of oxygen, driving the crew to start seeing things? This certainly isn’t helped by the ship’s yeoman, a bushy-bearded, superstitious nerd who likes reading weird fiction out loud; what he reads, as far as I can tell, doesn’t actually exist, nor does the magazine he’s reading from, but we all recognize the genre, don’t we?
A running gag of other sailors not knowing what “malediction” means and being told to look it up is among the few laughs this film has; they’re a welcome break in the tension, especially as the film makes so much use of jumpscares that it’s more effective when they don’t happen.
David Twohy is a decent director (whose excellent Pitch Black is probably his standout work) who, along with screenwriters Lucas Sussman and, of all people, Darren Aronofsky, has put together a movie that really wants to be something more than it is, and at times comes close to succeeding. A World War II submarine psychological horror film isn’t a common genre mashup, but it doesn’t really do enough with either of those shopworn genres to stand out. While the cast of career bit players and TV actors are all decent, their characters are only somewhat sketched out.
Still, though, there are truly effective moments that help elevate this film from mere schlock to something approaching decent. Perhaps the best one is a scene where one of the officers slowly comes to realize that his reflection is moving a little slower than he is. While it’s a less than original trick, it’s done masterfully well as we’re still unsure whether everything is happening as we see it, or if it’s another oxygen-deprived hallucination; but then again, it’s ruined at the end by yet another jumpscare.
And that’s kind of the problem with this film — its overuse of jumpscares and pointless ghostly imagery that signifies nothing. I can tolerate bad CG — this is a movie from 2002 we’re talking about — but I would rather see that CG put to better use.
All that being said: I was expecting a schlockfest, and in many ways I got one, but this movie comes close enough to greatness that if it had been made ten years later, or twenty years earlier, it might have been a cult classic. As it is, it’s just a little shallow.
