I really wanted to love this, but the movie makes it impossible. It's one of these "Can you enjoy the ride?" deals. This would have been absolutely unforgivable if you'd paid cinema money to see it in a theatre, but in your living room it's a different proposition.
I thought I had stumbled upon a hidden indie horror gem for much of the movie. I'm old enough to be willing to forgive some jank in the practical effects (seriously, you feel like you're going to see the strings at any moment), especially when the movie is making up for it in so many other ways. I like the characters, I like the way it's shot and lit, I like the direction (except the framing of the antagonist in almost every shot where it appears) and the environments are great. It even seems like it's building up to something: some intriguing discoveries, some Lovecraftian details, some hints that there might be a clever denouement coming down the pipe. There is not. They really did not know how to end this.
Thematically, the fingerprints of As Above So Below are all over this. If you enjoyed that movie and you're willing to accept that you're getting more of that concept but in a package that is lower budget and mostly not as good, then congratulations: set your sights low, and you'll get more from it than you expect.
On the positive side, there were many points where I was reminded of Season 1 of The Terror, in that you have a bunch of tough men in a dangerous situation, with such daily stresses that you might expect a horror story to see them all tearing each other apart, but instead you get a lot of moments of genuine care and tenderness that make you realise that these men depend on kindness in order to survive. These moments of respect towards each other and even the animals were some of my favourite scenes. Just like The Terror, of course there's one agent of chaos in there and another figure of sufficient power to compel them forwards.
Too many directors look at the circumstances of their plot and think to themselves, "Hey! Darkness! Tight spaces! Stranded people! This is kind of like Alien!" and then barrel towards that idea without any subtlety, and unfortunately this is one of those. So, we're soon torn from the qualities of The Terror towards a box-ticking exercise of What Works (or What's Supposed To Work). Perhaps this is what they needed to do in order to get the film funded and made, but it does suffer for that. There were some ideas in here that could have been great if they'd stuck to the potential of their set-up and developed that. Given the midway reveal of what the miners are dealing with, I would have liked it to get a lot more weird and come to a very different ending.
