As Above So Below: The Only Way Over Is Through

There’s a particular type of scary movie that makes movement through a space a big part of the narrative. Take, for example, The Descent, which is pretty much what it says on the tin. A group of women are trapped in a cave system, and must press forward in hopes of finding a way out. [REC] (and its remake, Quarantine) inverts this by trapping a bunch of people in a quarantined apartment building and forcing them to move up higher and higher in the building as the lower floors become more dangerous, also bringing them closer to the source of the danger. I don’t run across films that do this especially well very often, so it’s nice when they do - constrained space and a relentless push in a particular direction can give the story a nice momentum, a sense of dread inevitability.

As Above So Below was a really pleasant surprise in a lot of ways. I went into it assuming it was going to be a movie about thrill-seeking teens encountering zombies, but it really wasn’t that at all. What it turned out to be was a surprisingly gripping story focused on an ever-deeper descent into darkness, wrapped in some goofy particulars that don’t completely undermine it, but do end up taking some of the bite out of it.

The goofiness starts early, as we meet our protagonist traveling incognito through Iran in search of some artifact. It’s apparently a very dangerous trip, because she makes a point of telling the camera that she if she gets caught, it would be very bad for her, but…she’s telling this to a camera that she’s carrying. In the middle of a crowded passenger bus. So much for secrecy. She meets a contact who smuggles her to an off-limits part of the city after a military-imposed curfew. He’s really nervous and keeps talking about how they can’t stay and how they need to go, and she sends him on while she breaks through a stone wall to unearth an ancient stone idol covered in writing, which she records as fast as she can before the military catches up to her.

So, yeah. This is Scarlett. She has two doctorates, speaks four languages, and has a black belt in Krav Maga. She also appears to be maybe 28. She’s continuing her late father’s work, a search for the legendary Philosopher’s Stone, an alchemical substance capable of transforming base metals into gold. She’s a swashbuckling adventurer crossing the globe looking for the stuff of myth. After her narrow escape in Iran, her quest leads her to Paris, to seek out George, a reclusive young man who also crosses the globe, breaking into historical sites to…repair things. George doesn’t want to help her, he’s still sore about an incident in Turkey, but she needs his help - he speaks Aramaic, and she doesn’t. She also needs his help to break into a church where noted alchemist Nicholas Flamel’s tombstone is located, because she’s sure that the map to the Philosopher’s Stone is hidden in his tombstone. Scarlett is accompanied on the journey by Benji, a documentarian recording her search for posterity. 

(This is my big problem with the film right here - Scarlett and George are characters right out of National Treasure or Tomb Raider, exaggerated enough that they’re hard to believe as actual people, and thought it doesn’t really matter so much once things get going and they aren’t abrasive or anything, it starts everything off on a ridiculous note that seeps its way back into the final act. It’s a jarring tonal mismatch, and a puzzling narrative choice.)

So the three of them break into a church, translate some stuff, and do some ad-hoc chemistry on the back of the tombstone to reveal a location in the Paris catacombs, an extensive tunnel system under the city housing the skeletal remains of  millions of residents going back centuries. Apparently, there are sections of the catacombs that have been closed off to the public for decades, if not centuries, and some of them run right underneath Flamel’s resting place. There’s some finagling as Scarlett recruits a group of urban explorers - Papillon, Souxie, and Zed - to guide Scarlett, Benji, and a very reluctant George into the catacombs. It’s rough going - narrow, claustrophobic, filled with piles of bones and sections choked with water, and then they arrive at a junction with only two ways forward. One is a narrow crawl over piles and piles of bones, the other is a partially blocked tunnel that Papillon absolutely refuses to enter. He knows these tunnels, and he knows that nobody who has ever gone through that tunnel has ever come back out. It’s a bad place.

And that’s when the other routes collapse, leaving that tunnel as the only way forward.

So this is, then, a journey into darkness. The six of them only have one way forward, and it’s into territory that swallows up anyone who enters it. Much to my pleasant surprise, it makes the most out of this, and once the action movies into the catacombs, much of the silliness of the opening is forgotten (though not all - Scarlett is dressed for a casual afternoon out, not caving) in favor of something relentless, unsettling, and strange. A lot of this is down to how the film is shot. It’s not a found-footage film per se, but everything’s shot using headcams, so there’s the same immediacy and visual claustrophobia that made Gonjiam so effective, enhanced by the actual claustrophobia of shooting on location in the actual Paris catacombs. Our field of view is as tight and compressed and limited as the setting, and seeing everything from the point of view of the protagonists means that the camera doesn’t really linger on things, so there’s just enough time to register that something’s off before we have time to process what exactly it was. Our perspective is as limited as those of the protagonists. Likewise, the film relies on practical effects that are restrained enough that they don’t distract from the experience. At no point does anything we see feel contrived or artificial, it all feels like it’s happening in that space and in real time, which gives the film a real punch. Out six protagonists are forced to keep pushing forward into an increasingly treacherous dark, descending deeper and deeper into what starts to seem like something other than the world as we know it.

And it’s a good story - as I said in the introduction, I was really afraid this was going to be some story about thrill-seekers encountering zombies in the Paris catacombs, which could have been really, really boring. But it isn’t. It becomes clear pretty early that these six people have gone someplace that might not actually exist in our world, one that doesn’t obey conventional ideas of space and time. For most of its runtime, it does a pretty good job of making things weird without overexplaining - it’s very good about just dropping peripheral strangeness in and letting it sort of exist without lingering on it or drawing too much attention to it, and once things get going the whole thing has enough momentum that things just keep get increasingly stranger and stranger, and the constant urgency of their situation, the claustrophobic cinematography and equally claustrophobic setting just means that when the really weird shit starts happening it feels relentless and inexplicable.

Well, at least until it’s actually explained. It’s not necessarily bad that there’s an underlying logic to what’s happening to the protagonists (and it largely resists spelling everything out), but this brings us back to the initial premise of the film, of Scarlett the adventurer, seeking out objects of myth. In the final act, it brings in just enough of the sort of mythology that you’d expect from, say, a Tomb Raider film that it weakens the ending somewhat. It doesn’t cripple it, doesn’t completely undo its effectiveness, but the shift to something more Indiana Jones-ish does undermine it enough that it doesn’t stick its landing as well as it could. Which is too bad - if it had just been about a bunch of thrill-seeking urb-ex types who got in way over their head, and the imagery and mythology and everything had just been left as it was for sharp-eyed fans of the classics to pick up on, it could have been really solid. The journey ever forward, ever downward freights everything with dread and unease, and the deeper they go, the stranger everything becomes, and the more danger they’re in, but bringing magic artifacts into it adds just enough silliness around the edges to dilute the final result.

IMDB entry

Available on Netflix

Available on Amazon