As much I love The Blair Witch Project, it hasn’t exactly been the best influence on cinema. While I am grateful it gave a boost to the found footage genre still going strong to this day, it has also seemed to be direct influence for such flawed works as 2014’s As Above, So Below.
And yet I have seen this film at least three times now. Part of the reason I have seen this that many times is because it is one of my wife’s favorite films, so I am a bit reluctant to write negatively about it. Also, I honestly enjoy much that happens in this picture, though it has enough, and significantly critical, flaws that I cannot honestly recommend it to any but the most ardent fans of the genre.
One problem is how it feels less an original work inspired partly by several previous features, and more like a pastiche of elements stolen from those works. That is a tad ironic as the lead character, played by Perdita Weeks, is an archeologist whose approach to her work demonstrates a shocking lack of respect for the preservation of historical artifacts. She is likely (nay, enthusiastic) to destroy an ancient object just to satisfy her curiosity. I could not help but think the inspiration for her character was Lara Croft, from the Tomb Raider series.
She is just as careless with those who assist her. When we first see her, she has risked her life to sneak into Iran to see an underground find before it is destroyed in a scheduled demolition explosion. She has likely also endangered the life of the guy who helps her get into that passage. We don’t know if anything happened to him, and likely his family, friends and probably even immediately adjacent neighbors. Nope, it’s all about her.
Her lack of concern for others is mentioned in the backstory of Ben Feldman, who agrees to be her translator for her next investigation, despite him doing time in a Turkish prison the last time she enlisted his assistance. Soon, she’s roping in others on a mission to infiltrate a previously unexplored part of the catacombs under Paris.
I’d like to take a moment to single out Feldman and his character. First, we had already seen him in one previous widely-watched found-footage movie, Cloverfield. That familiarity results in a bit of cognitive disconnect, as I found myself confusing his character from that film with him in this one. I suspect there is something in the nature of this genre that largely unknown actors are cast in them so as to prevent this type of disconnect. Why that doesn’t happen in other genres, I don’t know.
Admittedly, his character has one hell of a weird quirk in this picture, and that is he has a hobby of breaking into places and fixing old things. It’s beyond me why he needed to break into a church tower to fix their bell that hasn’t functioned in something like 300 years but he does. I like to think every hunchback in Paris immediately ran towards the church crying out for “SANCT-YOU-AIR-EEE!!!”
Soon, we’re into the meat of the movie, as these two and a rag-tag bunch of “urban explorers” go off the beaten path in the catacombs and find themselves going deeper and deeper until they appear to be in Hell. Among the lives Weeks endangers are Edwin Hodge as her cameraman, François Civil as an expert on the underground passages and Marion Lambert and Ali Marhyar as his assistants.
The derivative aspects of this movie are unfortunate, as there are some interesting set pieces once we are underground. Some of it is low hanging fruit, such as a choir performing in a grotto a wordless, moaning piece. That is the kind of thing that is too easy to unnerve somebody with, and I’m surprised they didn’t also have clowns and giant spiders show up. Other things are more interesting, such as a piano and a ringing telephone which are inexplicably in the catacombs. Even weirder is a car that is engulfed in flames.
These curious elements, and others, are associated with unpleasant moments in the past of some of these infiltrators. One aspect of this set-up I found baffling is how only a few in the group have these associations. I guess Lambert and Marhyar weren’t deemed important enough by whatever force is tormenting them to bother coming up with anything tied to something tragic in their past. Oh, and you just know if won’t bother fleshing out Hodge any more, as he is the only Black actor here. An unfortunate recurring trait of the horror genre is how poor Black characters fare, but this is even worse, as Hodge, being the camera expert, has the least amount of screen time of anybody. Ouch.
Actually, it is kind of odd he isn’t on camera more frequently, as there isn’t just one camera here, but one that each person is wearing on their head. This leads to even less image stability than most other found footage films, as the slightest head movement of a single “camera operator” means the image shakes. As somebody who has seen a great many such films, this didn’t bother me, but those who hated the jerky camera movements in other found footage films may want to take a pass.
The cultural influences are all over the place in this thing, and it feels a bit to me like those 90’s CD-ROM games that were just endless puzzles, few of which contributed to the overarching plot. Opening one passage requires knowing how to get into the burial chambers in the Egyptian pyramids, only to find the mysteriously preserved corpse of a Knight Templar inside. Beyond that is a hilariously over-the-top treasure room, where I expected the characters to start emoting like Daffy Duck in that Jack and the Beanstalk cartoon (“I’m rich! I’m wealthy!”). And in that treasure room, there’s hieroglyphics. Hieroglyphics. In France.
Hell, even the central element on which the entire plot hangs is bullshit, as Weeks has devoted her life (and will cost the lives of others) to the pursuit of…wait for it…alchemy. You know, that medieval turning-lead-into-gold bullshit. She will even find in the underground the Philosopher’s Stone that is the key to that, um, “science”, using it to heal a broken bone of a person and then not even bothering to try to bring that person back from the dead later, because she doesn’t believe it has that power. Mind you, she still tries to do that later for another person, so I guess her faith in its abilities had changed by then. Then she realizes she has the wrong stone, runs back for the right one, and brings that person back from the dead. Funny how she ran right by the corpse of somebody else on the return trip and never considers resurrecting them, when she now believes it will work on somebody else. What a pal.
It is all too easy to discern the elements As Above, So Below has pilfered from The Blair Witch Project, The Descent and REC, among others. One throughline I had not previously considered about these films (in addition to The Tunnel), is each has a strong female central character who, unfortunately, demonstrates a lack of concern for others, resulting in a loss of lives. I doubt any of these films had a deliberately misogynistic aspect to them, but it is hard to ignore in retrospect, and in the accumulated impact of multiple works.
Dir: John Erick Dowdle
Starring Perdita Weeks, Ben Feldman
Watched on blu-ray