Cave

Cave is commercial filmmaking at lowest common denominator.  As such the movie  displays more about us than about the world or its characters and demonstrates the power of the medium at its most nakedly manipulative.  Let Cave stand for all the instantly forgettable, pseudo-documentary horror films that stagger and stumble zombie-like through the multiplexes one after another weekend after weekend, all alike and all more or less frightening -- each Thursday, it's a new demonic possession or paranormal exploration featuring grainy night-vision goggles that turns out for the worst, another group of attractive, dim-witted teens exposed to hideous risk in some remote cabin or wilderness camp, another serial killer or zombie outbreak or reanimated corpse haunting the torture-porn corridors beneath some festering Balkan city.  Cave is a Norwegian picture accessible with many others of its kind on Netflix.  The movie has reasonable production values -- the camerawork is generally competent and the editing proficient.  The film is dubbed, a ghastly effect, but one that you soon learn to ignore.  The picture shows some spectacular landscapes -- high country in Norway with barren moors and sheets of glacier drooping down from low stony ridges, icy lakes, and huge roaring waterfalls.  (Norway is almost gratuitously beautiful and the outdoors sequences shot in the mountains above the vertiginous fjords are wonderful in their own right.)  The plot involves three thrill-seeking kids in their early twenties -- a feisty tom-boy girl, her clean-cut athletically inclined boyfriend, and, the odd man out and third-wheel, a damaged Afghan war veteran (apparently the Norwegians contributed troops to that conflict and, thus, have a ready store of PTSD plots that they can now deploy as a result).  The war vet has shaggy hair and seems a little petulant, not surprisingly since he was previously intimate with the girl who is now sleeping with his best friend,  The two men are obviously competitive with respect to the girl and, as we suspect pretty soon, it's a serious mistake for this trio to undertake the exploration of deep and watery cave somewhere in the Norwegian arctic.  Even before they are underground, the boys are spooking one another, driving recklessly over the mountain passes, and acting erratically.  At night, alone in the high mountains, the athletic kid seems to see a light following them in the darkness.  As they are canoeing to the cave entrance, the boyfriend whistles the "Dueling Banjos" theme from Deliverance and the girl cheerfully tells the Afghan vet that he's playing the part of "Ned Beatty and so you'll get fucked in the ass."  The vet purports to not have seen the film.  Underground, there's lots of rappelling and trekking through huge rooms.  The explorers find a pup tent full of bloody sleeping bags and it seems that there is someone in the cave with them.  The boy and girl have sex in front of the war veteran.  He creeps up next to the sleeping girl and masturbates.  The film exploits exceedingly primal fears -- the darkness, extremely constricted spaces, watery abysses with floating corpses blocking the passage.  The vet goes berserk and kills the athletic kid.  He has spirited away a set of night vision goggles and torments the girl by stalking her in the pitch darkness.  She rallies and kills him by bashing in his face with a rock.  After some more dangers, the girl emerges from the cave, swimming through an underwater siphon to emerge, confusingly enough, in an open river.  Hiking through the snowfields, the girl is picked up by an older man, a stranger who we have seen surveying the girl as she struggles to climb up cliffs in the river gorge.  (This scene is an obvious homage to Deliverance.)  When he gets out of the truck to get her a blanket -- she is trembling with cold -- this man whistles "Dueling Banjos".  (Presumably, he is the psycho war veteran's father who we hear the killer talking to by cell-phone, possibly an accomplice who has lured other people into the cave and killed them, although this is unclear.) 

The movie is scary, actually thrilling in a few sequences -- it makes the most of scary shadows, tight crevasses, and water-filled cave passages.  There are plenty of "boo!" shock cuts. The plot is so vestigial it can't be counted as a narrative.  Many of the scenes make only marginal sense -- when a tiny wormhole tunnel collapses and almost kills the war vet, no one seems concerned that one of the ways out of the cave is now blocked and inaccessible.  The bloody sleeping bags are never explained and we don't really know the man's intentions at the end of the movie.  The girl escapes from the cave by flailing around in the water, either descending or ascending, it isn't clear which, until she somehow surfaces in the river.  This is really just a haunted house thriller, the gorilla in the decaying mansion, except that the haunted house is a cave.  The dialogue is rudimentary.  How did the vet hide the big night-vision goggles in his gear?  Why do the boy and girl have sex in front of him?  Will night-vision goggles work in the pitch darkness of a cave?  Does Norway even have big, water-filled caves of this kind -- the film was shot in Rana in the Nordland province and "Mexico".  (Norway does have caves like this and, in fact, an expedition into an actual water-filled cave in which two Finnish explorers died in a siphon seems to be the basis for parts of the story.)  The closing titles begin with this legend in Norwegian "Cave 2 coming soon." 

I hope so.  I might actually tune in.  This movie is very short (one hour and 11 minutes) but it's still not worth your time.  But it shows how very little a movie has to contain to meet some of the expectations of its audience and to keep you watching for more  than an hour.