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MOVIE REVIEW
Underland (2025)
"Nothing here but history," sang those astute cultural archeologists Steely Dan in "The Caves of Altamira," as the song's protagonist went looking for ancient figures on the wall of an underground cavern. Altamira and a few other famous prehistoric sites crop up in Robert Macfarlane's 2019 nonfiction book "Underland," which takes a bracingly broad and poetic approach to what lies below the surface of the Earth and finds that history is only the start of it. "Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save," writes the author, invoking the mystical element that hangs over both his book and the documentary now made from it by Mr. Macfarlane and director Robert Petit, with the involvement of Darren Aronofsky as an executive producer. Venture below the surface of the world and things usually separate come close together: science and magic, past and future, oxygen and poison, plus the members of a documentary crew squeezed into alarmingly tight spaces.
The film's three strands are inspired by the larger roll call of subterraneans in the book. In Mexico, Fátima Tec Pool and colleagues investigate the Yucatán cave system where ancient Mayans ventured in search of the underworld. In Las Vegas, urban explorer Bradley Garrett wades into the modern world's sewers, bunkers and tunnels. And two kilometers beneath the surface of Canada, physicist Mariangela Lisanti works at SNOLAB, where the physical distance from surface interference might help fleeting evidence for the universe's dark matter to stand revealed. These stories are framed by more explicitly metaphysical montages, layered under sinuous ethereal music by Hannah Peel and a voiceover from German actress Sandra Hüller speaking of myth and legend, of the roots of world trees and rivers of the dead. But in this environment the factual and the fanciful coexist naturally. A spelunking archeologist holds up in front of him a handheld LiDAR scanning device so its green laser can spear out into the dark, and it's not all that different from any of his predecessors striking the same pose with a flaming torch.
In the urban world poverty sinks underground, as Mr. Garrett notes while clambering over the rusted trash and flushed detritus of Las Vegas; the film has an inherently political edge as the consumerist surface world goes down in flames and sinks under the waves. But the wonder of the underland expands infinitely, making human matters seem small, for better or worse. Awe, both the calming and the terrifying kind, are legitimate responses to the film's sights and implications, especially when it visually rhymes a Mayan human hand-print on a Paleolithic limestone wall with the raised palm of a "Do Not Enter" warning notice, collapsing time in ways a text can set up but visuals can deliver. The warning sign is attached to a site where nuclear waste is stored. "Do not drill or dig before 13,000 A.D." says another notice, hoping for the best. Mr. Garrett, with an optimism born of close scrapes in very narrow places, detects a positive aspect to our creation and then burial of radioactive forever-poison: "The fact we're thinking about the well-being of future generations gives me hope that humanity has some care." Echoing in the caverns of the deep Earth, the concept sounds almost convincing.
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