Neil Marshall

In The Descent (2005), six women go underground and the shortage of space is frightening before Marshall needs to add much else. He limits what they can see and makes us attend to whatever lies outside the picture. We were frightened by how little room the women had to move, long before the gore became the main concern. Following his horror debut, Dog Soldiers (2002), this is the film that gives us the clearest reason to rate him.

The work expanded through Doomsday (2008) and the historical action film Centurion (2010). Game of Thrones put his skill at staging large battles to work in episodes directed in 2012 and 2014. The studio reboot Hellboy (2019) preceded his return to independent horror with The Reckoning (2020). The later features have met a cooler critical response than the early horror films, so we would be cautious about recommending his work wholesale.

Go back to The Descent and the reasons for our confidence are specific. David Julyan’s music adds pressure, but the sound design does more to make the unseen space troubling. Marshall has also given Shauna Macdonald’s Sarah and Natalie Mendoza’s Juno enough substance for their danger to matter. Macdonald makes us care about Sarah; Mendoza makes trust harder, while Alex Reid’s Beth helps establish that these women know one another. When Marshall lets the violence become unpleasant, it works because we have already been made anxious for them.

The weakness is how unevenly that attention is shared. Rebecca, Sam and Holly, played by Saskia Mulder, MyAnna Buring and Nora-Jane Noone, remain less distinct than Sarah and Juno, and the darkness sometimes makes them harder to tell apart. Marshall can sustain the tension between the women without giving every relationship enough detail to justify it. That matters in a film whose violence depends on our concern for particular people, rather than an anonymous group. Start with The Descent, but take its confined spaces as seriously as its bloodshed.