Here is an example of the limited-horizons apocalypse movie: with a necessarily tight perspective on the end of days, doubtless for budgetary reasons, it’s as if The Day of the Triffids was seen entirely from a polytunnel, or 28 Days Later from inside an isolation ward. Here, director Luke Sparke angles downwards in his intro from a massacre in an office high-rise overlooking a devastated skyline, towards the ground zero of the action: the bottom of a crater where stricken civilian Mark (Jamie Costa) is pinned under a boulder.
After freeing himself just before a rockfall that seals him into a tunnel, Mark encounters Kate (Emalia) also scrabbling around in the dark. Displaying a striking level of panic and a nasty leg wound, she insists – at gunpoint – that he take the rear as they look for a way out. Not only does this petty thief’s looking-after-number-one attitude augur an imminent sticky end for her, the chittering they hear in the dark all around suggests the means is close at hand.
Sparke shows some camera chops in conducting this crawlspace nightmare in a series of long takes, sometimes pulling back for poignant, Zippo-lit distance from the spelunkers. But the scenario, as written by Tom Evans, gives the film painfully little room for manoeuvre; there’s lots of tedious wrangling over resources such as light and phone signals, and all-too-obvious false dawns for exit possibilities. When Mark and Kate aren’t scrabbling around, they swap contrived character revelations that feel as if they were invented on the spot to pass the time. And there’s little sense of how the critters – chitinous escapers from Starship Troopers – act behaviourally, or how they fit into the bigger apocalyptic picture.
One thing you have to admit is that the film is paced nicely for the experience of two people trapped in a tunnel; it’s both somehow agonisingly underwritten and, with the antic camera and incessant score, strangely overblown. At least the lead actors get a good workout: as an evident graduate of the Shelley Duvall school of panicky acting, Emalia displays a full overadrenalised palette, from hyperventilation to stressed-out severity to throat-tightening meltdown.