As Above, So Below (2014)

A fortnight ago, I was several hundred feet under the streets of Paris, wandering through endless tunnels walled with human bones, holding my video camera in one hand, and finding myself surprisingly regardless of the camera screen. I was focused on the real, what was going on around me in the place that I was at this very time. The footage was incidental; it could be looked at when I got home. For now, I was going to really have fun and learn a lot exploring the Catacombs. Having been alerted to the release of As Above, So Below from its exciting enough but rather usual marketing campaign last year, but not having seen it yet, I thought a lot about the idea of a handheld picture being made down there.

The Paris Catacombs only allow 200 people down at any one time, hence the often lengthy queue. The strange thing was, the place was so vast that we only saw perhaps six or eight other people the entire time we were down there. The majority of the time, we were alone. That sheds a little light on how huge the tunnels are, and that's the guided route. Visitors will observe alternative routes leading off of tunnels, the tourist route marked out by gates. Some of these alternative tunnels ride off into complete darkness. If people arrogant and intrusive enough to be found in a movie like this were to cut the locks and skulk off, it could most definitely end pretty disastrously.

What would make a movie like that even better, I decided, was my realisation that I paid no attention to what my camera was capturing, but what was in front of me. This offered massive potential for forces/creatures unseen to the characters but acknowledged by the audience. This could be really chilling. It was obvious: the Catacombs made for a brilliant horror film setting.

In fairness, As Above, So Below ended up going in a somewhat unexpected direction towards its conclusion, and although a bit messily constructed, it is a highly researched film. Respect must be paid for effort made. There is a lot of mythical and legendary namedropping, such as the philosopher's stone and Nicolas Flamel, and a lot of that irritatingly vague cryptography that the characters must battle their baffled little selves through. There is also a lot of jaw-dropping stupidity from one solitary character.

Leading lady Scarlett (Perdita Weeks) is a middle-class parent's wet dream. She looks no older than 25, yet she holds two PhDs, a Masters degree, and speaks six languages fluently (two of those being dead), and to top it all off, she is a university professor! She is everything I aspired to be at the naive age of 13. She is like Lara Croft. Because not only is she a painfully qualified academic, she is also a badass (which in this instance is synonymous with moron). She doesn't have the sexual prowess and ridiculously tightly clad bod, but she unlawfully trespasses on an Iranian cave system that is minutes from being demolished by dynamite, knowing the legal ramifications, and presumably, just how mindblowingly stupid and death-welcoming the decision is. All the warning alarms are blaring, and she finds the Rose Key, a large relic that her scholarly father sought his whole life. Lo and behold, explosives start going off all around her, and there is a frantic, and admittedly tense, run-for-life back to the exit, via helmetcam.

This is the format for most of the movie, plonking it in the increasingly cloudy subgenre I know and love...the Found Footage. The more people make this kind of fad movie, the more audiences ask, 'Who finds the footage?' The early and more classic examples of FF offered explanations as to the recovery of the materials, but of late, the genre is straying from being 'found', and settling as 'homemade'. There no longer has to be a barely-believable reason that this footage, exactly as it is presented to us, was recovered from some unsurvived crime scene or tragedy. It is now more of a medium, just a different narrative perspective, which continues to be exercised to varying levels of success. The premise for filming the incidents we witness are ever up for question: it helps if one or more persons has some kind of professional business in filmmaking or television; those assholes who just inexplicably film every mundane thing that he and his asshole friends do, with seemingly limitless battery power, are far less likely to keep our attention.

Scarlett is the subject of a documentary being filmed by Benji (Edwin Hodge) about her uptake of the search for the philosopher's stone, which drove her father to self-destructive madness. She seems minimally deterred by the stone's blatantly negative psychic affects, or by anything else for that matter. She breaks into demolition sites, churches, large underground tombs, and when her old flame George (Ben Feldman) is reluctantly recruited on her latest mission into the Catacombs, where she is convinced the stone is hidden, we find out that her shenanigans formerly resulted in the couple's incarceration in a Turkish prison. She is irritatingly relentless in her carelessness, which she masquerades as determination and adventurousness.

George speaks Arabic, which is why he is recruited for the various translations needed on the quest, and his skills are centre stage as he gives the English form of an Arabic riddle. And whaddaya know?! It still has perfect rhythm and rhyme, as though it were originally written in English, although this is surely impossible. Then, in a Paris nightclub, Scarlett ropes a semi-suave looking dude named Papion (not sure where the 'butterfly' symbolism occurs in any part of the film -- his parents must have seen in him some gentility which we do not). He is en garde, and swaggery, and he can show the group a non-official route to the treasure. And old Pap is a package deal: he brings relatively professional cronies along, who are experienced climbers, potholers, etc. Seems like a fairly safe setup for what is inevitably doomed to at least partial failure. Scarlett will still have her documentary regardless, we can concede early on.

It follows a fairly standard pattern at first: caves collapse, no way but forward, group leader arrogantly insists they take the tunnel of doom rather than the legit ones, a whole bunch of rather juvenile-feeling clue-busting, which Scarlett continuously solves quickly and inexplicably. It's always one of those things that could refer to fucking anything, and that only Jonathan Creek could solve, and only after several days of non-active conversations and thoughtful stares in a duffle coat. But then, a few peer-deaths down the line, things start getting... I dunno...not theological, not existential, perhaps a little spiritual. In another problem-solving scenario, and probably the most risky one yet, Scarlett concedes that the reason the world is going crazy and rooms are shifting and weird cloaked figures are stalking them, is that each of the survivors has some guilt, some personal demon which haunts them, that they must release before they are to get out. With a little Inferno referencing and a generally Abrahamic Damnation style, things steer away from the lower-market FF movies with many quick flashes of ghostly faces, and go in a far more big-budget direction with its ideology, leaning more toward the likes of Insidious and The Possession.

The plot and setting seemed relatively original for a movie of its kind, but it constantly felt like something was missing. We had the slow and subtle build-up, with plenty of calmness and establishment of plan and walking and talking, and the first few 'encounters' are typically ambiguous in nature, warranting the characters to shrug them off or not recognise them at all until shit really starts going down. And for the first hour or so, I believed that some kind of dramatic peak was imminent, but this movie left me totally blue-balled. All great (or good...or even just mediocre) horror movies must have at least one moment of forceful impact, the Oh Shit moment, in which everything that you have watched so far comes to fruition, and you feel thrilled. You need the moment in which everyday existence is turned upside down, and the hapless characters find themselves within a scenario that they never imagined they'd experience. We need the world to fall away.

And the crazy thing is that in this movie, it quite literally does, yet it is never enough. It's like 100 minutes of digital foreplay followed by the light going out...and not even a cigarette to conclude. It's all good stuff, but it didn't have any real climax. And moreover, the ending leaves everything unnervingly unanswered. From the course of action they've given us, we all make assumptions about the condition of the world the few survivors escape to. It's no real conclusion. But the movie is far less shaky and so more watchable than a lot of its kind, and gets some interesting shots, and some pretty great atmosphere from its sets.

I feel like I want to give As Above, So Below more credit than it truly deserves: the use of the Parisian catacombs is brilliant, themes are interesting and performances and camera work is somewhat above average. But the scary bits are far too diluted, and most of them turn out to have been contained in the trailer, which is one of my pet peeves. It seems unfulfilled, and that's how it left me feeling. Not all that I had expected. It's worth seeing, and it's fun enough, but if you're looking for a Found Footage movie that packs a punch, go for the Blair Witch Project, or even low-enders like Crowsnest and Grave Encounters 2. If you're strong of stomach, go straight to Cannibal Holocaust.