“Something’s in the air.”

Low budget horror has been on the rise ever since The Blair Witch Project was able to maximize its profits by employing a “found footage” style of filming, having most of the terror appear off camera or in the darkness and pitting its stars against one another as things head south. Beneath, the feature length debut of director Ben Ketai, owes a lot to Blair Witch, in that it borrows from it what most films in its wake ignore and ignores what those films have beaten into the ground (namely, found footage). Beneath plays its hand close to its chest for the most part when it comes to how it doles out scares. It also forgoes the dreaded found footage camera work entirely, save for a nice “fake out” scene at the very beginning when our main protagonist is walking around with her phone, video recording her father’s employees in order to piece together a video montage of them saying nice things about him for his retirement. It cleverly lulls you into thinking you’re about to watch yet another Blair Witch knockoff before abandoning the first person camera all together.

I’m aware of how much of a ringing endorsement the previous paragraph sounds like. Unfortunately, there are issues right off the bat following the wink and nod to horror fans with the camera phone gag. The central premise of Beneath is fairly preposterous. George Marsh (Jeff Fahey: Lawnmower Man) is a coal miner who is about to retire. At his retirement party the night before his final day on the job (yes, they’re doing this old gag), his daughter (played by Kelly Noonan), an environmental lawyer, is drinking with the entire mining crew. They take umbrage with her stance on the environmental implications of coal mining and for some reason these full grown, (somewhat) educated adults with plenty of life experience and common sense come to the conclusion that it’s a terrific idea for an untrained civilian to trek down into a dangerous coal mine with one way in and one way out. Must be one hell of a company insurance policy!

Anyway, you can probably guess what happens once we’re down in the mine. The machine used to drill into the cave wall hits a crevasse, exposing a large crack in the wall that leads to a 100 year old mine shaft that collapsed. This creates a structural collapse, killing a few men and destroying the air filtration system while also locking our characters in this mine until help can arrive in 72 hours. This is a tale that’s been told time and time again, the only difference being that this time we’re in a mine, 600 feet beneath the surface. All the beats up until the mine collapses are predictable, making it a chore to get to the good part. And even once we’re there, it’s really not a matter of “what” happens so much as “how” the filmmakers choose to present it that makes this film interesting.

Fans of The Descent will be quick to accuse Beneath of being derivative of that film and they’d be right. As much as Beneath borrows from Blair Witch, it also takes a few pages out of The Descent’s playbook as well. Our characters are running around in the dark, but instead of being chased around by malnourished alopecia patients, they’re turning on one another as the methane in the mine begins to build up and pushes their sanity to the brink. One of Ketai’s smartest directorial decisions is to utilize several lingering shots after our actors exit the scene, creating a sense of fear of what’s hiding there in the dark. He does it several times and not once is it not effective. It’s little details like this that make it so frustrating when Beneath doesn’t rise to the occasion in other areas.

Another thing I liked about the film is its ability to maximize the claustrophobia of being trapped in a mine. The idea of being trapped underground is scary enough but our characters are then corralled into a RV sized tin can equipped with oxygen tanks and are expected to stay there for three days when help finally arrives. Spoiler: they don’t stay there for three days! I should also mention that the acting is pretty good for a low budget horror film. Unfortunately, these characters seem to be on a collision course with stupidity every time they have to make a decision.

And that is ultimately my major issue with Beneath: it continually yo-yoed back and forth between good film-making and bad film-making. There was no in between. I was constantly excited by something and then let down minutes later. The best example of this is the aforementioned claustrophobia of the mine. Our protagonists are trying to find their way to a certain area in this mine that they know like the back of their hand, only I have no idea where we are or how far we’ve gotten from our starting point. Ever. Beneath has no concept of geography which is absurd, considering it takes place inside the earth!

Beneath is a polarizing experience. Good actors, dimwitted characters. Good location, poor sense of geography. Good ideas, half-assed execution. All these things add up to make a very average movie. Beneath has scares but can’t back those scares up with a satisfying story. You’d be better off just watching The Descent or Blair Witch one more time as those films have a whole lot more going on between the scary parts.