As Above So Below (2014)

(In French, On TV, August 2019) I’m usually able to give mixed reviews even to terrible movies — If the premise doesn’t work, maybe I’ll praise a few good moments, or stop to talk about the performances, or discuss elements of the plot that were promising. But with As Above So Below, I fear we’ve reached a perfect trifecta of failure. The premise is dull, the cinematography is terrible, the characters are unlikable and the rest of the film is unremarkable except when it’s trying its best to exasperate its audience. Somehow, we’re meant to be interested in an expedition that goes deep in the Paris catacombs to find a magical device of some sort. Except that they keep going deeper and deeper into hell (or whatever), encountering mysterious things and being killed along the way. This already-uninteresting premise is made worse by its execution as a found-footage film (despite some of the footage being quite obviously inaccessible) with the camera constantly jerking around. But writer-director John Erick Dowdle then makes things even worse, because even the characters are terrible people upon whom the worse fates are actively wished for. The protagonist spouts some incomprehensible mystical jargon in between self-flattering moments that only made us dislike her more. (Tellingly, she describes herself seriously as a PhD “symbologist,” something not found outside Dan Brown novels.)  I rarely complain about horror movies in which the main characters survive, but I’ll make an exception in this case: I was really disappointed when three of them made it out alive of the catacombs in what may be the film’s only halfway-effective visual. The scares are dull, the claustrophobia not nearly as effective as The Descent, and whatever weirdness the film throws on-screen quickly makes the film jump into “anything can happen, whatever I don’t care” territory. Sometimes, you have to take some time away from a genre to appreciate its most average entries, but as it turns out I don’t miss found-footage movies in the slightest and the past five years haven’t done As Above So Below any favours.