Urban Explorer (2011)

Andy Fetscher's Urban Explorer was one of my several cheap DVD store punts that turned out to be, as Roger Ebert once called Last House, "about four times as good as you'd expect". I am a keen urban explorer in real life, and am always totally compelled by movies that use it as a subject. Truth is, amazing suspense can be conjured on the screen simply by having characters be in places they shouldn't, such as in Area 51. The likes of As Above So Below and Chernobyl Diaries keep me coming back again and again, and while Urban Explorer has a lot in common with them, it delivers on the visceral horror aspects that the other titles may be lacking. I discovered this movie by chance about a year ago, and have since snagged a wonderful boyfriend who lived in Germany for many years and is fluent in the language, so I was eager to watch this movie again for his input, if nothing else, for his unique insight into the language and translations. He didn't disappoint.

Still I think he's raather tastyyyy!

A very cosmopolitan movie, Urban Explorer follows the journey of Denis and Marie are a couple ready to snoop around the undercarriage of Berlin for their anniversary, along with other couple Lucia and Juna, under the guidance of local Kris. Naturally, all seems well at first, before things go disastrously wrong, and they are stranded miles beneath the surface where nobody knows they have ventured. However, one of the cool perspectives that this movie offers is the lack of supernatural interference. There are no radiation zombies like in Chernobyl Diaries, no Dante's Inferno like in As Above, and no time-travelling Soviets like in Devil's Pass. All we have to fear this time around is a truly maniacal German fellow with huge teeth, huge eyes and a beard that even I don't find sexy, and isn't a real person always that much more frightening than a monster?

The group are fairly unremarkable, but can all be defined by one trait. Lucia is the dumbass who causes the whole disaster in one absent-minded moment; Juna is the Asian chick who may be into other chicks and wears a dangly earring that will later explain her fate when found on the floor of the Maniacal German's lair. Marie is a Venezuelan nurse and the girlfriend of Denis, who it later transpires once studied in Berlin, and is actually quite a competent German speaker, despite insisting that he only speaks it "a bit". Kris is the shifty German guide who we decide early on must be the antagonist because he's just so damn shifty and German, but we later find out he's the very least of our issues.

I was told I was in a Bob Clarke movie!

Midway through the movie, weird hermit Armin (Klaus Stiglmeier) literally drops into the story, offering suspiciously convenient help to the injured party and his desperate comrades. It all takes a turn that we don't tend to see in these movies, and paces the story in a more patient way, not to its detriment. This is a longer movie than many of its kind, but it works well. There are sequences in which silence and space are drawn out to excruciating lengths, crafting a proper sense of suspense. Urban Explorer is a great and slick-looking picture, and it throws some new ideas into the ring. It also wisely avoids the temptation to format itself as a found footage picture, and by doing so allows itself maximum cinematic freedom. It is not constrained by what the characters would be filming themselves, and has fun with the space and angles this allows. It really is about four times better than you'd expect.

"It's the gayest show in the fucking world!"

Sure, the characters are nothing special and this is no piece of high intellectualism, but it offers a fucking good viewing experience of its type, and goes above and beyond to deliver an engaging show that isn't just a dime a dozen. It also has that typically European ballsy attitude to conclusions that mainstream American audiences don't appreciate: the horrors are man-made, and even when it looks like the nightmare is over, this significantly powerful and relentless human being wipes away all hope in the way that true criminals do in the real world. There is a boldly hopeless tone to the film, and I truly admire a movie that dares to lean into this sort of theme, with no happy ending and no unrealistic escapes. It's a tense and unnerving experience that never lets up, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

(Incidentally, my boytoy advised me that the hermit speaks very colloquial German and that Denis' conversation is suitably amateur for his character, so it is even a carefully written movie.)