It
could be considered the psycho-horror version of the Ray Milland Cold War
thriller, The Thief. There is
virtually no dialogue to be heard throughout the film, but frankly, there
really isn’t much left for Rachel and her serial killer husband Ben to say. She
is rather disappointed he turned out to be a murderer and he is rather
disappointed she deduced the truth. Consequently, he tries to consign her to a
watery grave in Douglas Schulze’s The
Dark Below (trailer
here),
which opens tomorrow in Phoenix.
As
we learn from flashbacks, Ben swept Rachel off her feet when she enrolled in
his scuba class. With his help, she became an accomplished extreme diver in her
own right. She in turn helped him open his scuba shop. However, she starts
suspecting something is off when the cops repeatedly come asking for
information on missing customers—all of whom are women. Unfortunately, Ben soon
knows that she knows, so he drugs her and crams her pliable body into her wetsuit,
hoping to stage a diving accident in the frozen lake. She might go quietly, but
she won’t give up without a fight.
Man,
you can just feel the frostbite while watching Dark Below. Admittedly, the dialogue-free approach is a gimmick,
but it works rather well. An over-orchestrated score can be heard throughout
the film, presumably to fill the silence, but the film would have been better
served by more hauntingly minimalist themes. (Frankly, only a blustering ham
like Meryl Streep could approve of the way these cues crash down on the
audience’s ears)
One
thing is beyond debate—nobody can fault Lauren Mae Shafer for her relentlessly committed,
harrowingly physical performance as Rachel. You shiver and wince along with her
as she suffers from exposure, oxygen deprivation, and straight-up battery.
Veronica Cartwright is also quietly (by necessity) powerful, as Rachel’s
mother, an unusually intuitive horror movie mom. At first, David G.B. Brown
looks a little too soft to be a hardcore serial killer, but that makes it even
more disturbing when he flips on the psychopathic switch.
