It feels like a long time since I last saw a horror film as weird and indie in feel as the Spyder Dobrofsky written and directed Down Below (who man also stars as the protagonist). Try as I might I did find a lot of this quite hard to follow, that may be down to purposeful direction, but with me currently in the middle of a bout of flu, it could also be down to me feeling feverish. Regardless, I loved much of my time with this trippy horror.
This gets off to a fantastic start with a prologue that features a crazed preacher (David Steen - Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, Django Unchained) gassing his congregation with the assistance of a young helper. Fast forward twenty years and we are introduced to Salem (Dobrofsky), a man whose life is in ruins after he was charged with exposing himself to a young child, something which he states didn't happen as the child described it, and which was all the more suspicious due to a video of the event swiftly being uploaded to the internet by an unknown person. With his wife and friends having cut themselves out of his life, the only 'friend' he has is in the form of a prostitute - Karisma (Alexis Knapp - Project X), someone who feels a strange connection to the man due to strange visions of a massacre she had that seemed linked to Salem. With evidence of the same person who uploaded the original video clip once again messing with the man, Salem sees this as his chance to finally track down the person and get them to admit to their wrongdoing so that he can rebuild his life.
I'm not sure how accurate my plot description is as the film moves around a bit in terms of who the protagonist is. In addition to scenes featuring Salem and scenes featuring Karisma, there is also a third lead, detective Bandini (Christopher Livingston - Grey's Anatomy) who is in charge of Salem's case, and who has his own rabbit hole that he falls down into. Both Karisma and Bandini seemed like appendages of Salem as their storylines seem closely intertwined with his, even when from their perspectives they are not at all. There were a decent amount of strange side characters with some notable names appearing, such as Doug Jones (The Shape of Water), the ever reliable Eric Roberts (Lore, But Deliver Us from Evil) as psychiatrist Dr. Rockeby, and Mai Ling (Crank: High Voltage, The Crow) as Thorn.
Salem was the main character though his story wasn't a straight forward one. There wasn't much action on his part, instead the story of this character is presented via strange flashback sequences and convenient clues planted around his late mother's home that he lives in.
The horror was rarely direct, instead there was a sense of an undercurrent of madness best exemplified with some trippy arthouse style montages of quick images edited together one after the other. I loved these moments and were the highlight of the film. I liked the reoccurring image of a gas mask, something that came up time and again during the ninety five minute run time, from the prologue, all the way up to the end, with each of the main characters encountering this device on their surreal travels. The soundtrack was another delight of this, I enjoyed how the music being played over the prologue was literally being played by a character on screen, and elsewhere it usually delighted. I did think the song that plays over the end credits sounded a bit generic compared to the rest of the film.
As much as the plot confused me, there were parts of it I think that maybe I got. There was a neat late film revelation that draw together disparate threads, linking the film together in a way that was mostly satisfying. That third act was the best part of the film, I guess you could say some of the middle part did get slightly meandering at times.
Did I fully understand the events of Down Below? No, of course not. I did however find myself fully hooked on it from beginning to end, the mystery, and how the film was presented kept me glued to the picture, needing to know where this polyester prison would end. Down Below is being distributed by Gravitas Ventures in the U.S.
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