Courtesy photo
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.