A trained projectionist but self-taught director, Henrik Martin Dahlsbakken’s third feature, “Cave,” closes the in . It will be the 27-year-old Norwegian’s third film in two years — and he has another three to come. “Of course it is a question of coincidences, but also of a will — and a need — to tell these stories. As long as you thrive with what you do, you can have a rather high level of production,” said Dahlsbakken, who started making films when he was 8 years old. “My best friend’s father had a video camera, which we used to make slapstick comedies and horror thrillers. We took it very seriously and spent a lot of time working on it,” he said. At 19, he tried to get into the Norwegian Film School in Lillehammer but was rejected as he was “too young.” “In retrospect, I couldn’t agree more,” said Dahlsbakken, who took courses in media science and film history at university, then “learned by doing,” directing several shorts — including “The Time in Between” (2009), and “The Devil’s Ballroom” (2012), which toured the festival circuit.
“I see production as my film school, with everything I learned and all the mistakes I made,” explained Dahlsbakken, who in 2015 premiered his first feature, the family drama “Returning Home,” which won the top prize at the Nordic Film Days in Lübeck. Originally, “Returning Home” was going to be a short, but the helmer realized that it would work better as a feature. “When I [got support] by a regional film fund, it became a full-length production, produced on a $145,000 budget. So was my next film, ‘Late Summer,’ which I made with the same crew and budget,” he said. Dahlsbakken has also made “The Outlaws,” which he describes as “a timeless Bonnie and Clyde story with several musical elements,” also based on real-life events in 1926, when two tramps kill two policemen after a failed train robbery and went on the run. “Cave,” starring Heidi Toini, Mads Sjøgård Pettersen, Benjamin Helstad and Ingar Helge Gimle, is an adventure thriller about a group of former military elites who set out to explore an uncharted abyss.
It was based on a real-life event. “I got the idea when I read about two Finns who were killed when they were [exploring around Norwegian town] Mo i Rana — it is obviously the most dangerous expedition you can make, to investigate underground. I developed the project in six months, and again made the film with the same crew,” he said This autumn, Dahlsbakken will start principal photography for “Cave 2,” the second in a planned trilogy. Production will continue during the winter — “it is a winter film” — but unlike “Cave,” it will be action comedy with Western elements. At Haugesund’s New Nordic Films co-production and financing market for works-in-progress, Nordic Genre Boost, he will introduce his sixth feature, “Substitute,” a sci-fi thriller scripted by Jan Trygve Røyneland (Erik Poppe’s “The King’s Choice”). Produced by Finn Gjerdum for Oslo-based Paradox, it is set in 60-70 years in the future, when it is possible to create human substitutes, when a person ddies, complete with most of the memories of the deceased.
Dahlsbakken said he is “very inspired from the 1970s’ U.S. thrillers.”We have detected a history of abnormal traffic from your network so we ask that you please complete the following form to confirm that you are not a robot and are indeed a real person. Most of this time this happens if there has been a lot of malicious bot activity from your current internet provider's network or you are using a VPN. It likely has nothing to do with you. We're really sorry for the hassle.Movie ReviewSome men, when they want to feel particularly manly, retreat to their man caves—spare rooms or basements filled with tools or sports paraphernalia or other accoutrements of he-dom. For other men—and women too, for that matter—DIY caves aren't enough. So they search out of the real thing. Frank McGuire is an admitted bad husband, bad father, bad all-around guy when it comes to such things as mowing the lawn or making the mortgage payment. But he's an awesome caver, and he's all about exploring their fearsome depths to the fullest—going, truly, where no one has gone before.
"He's the most determined cave diver in the world," Carl, Frank's rich benefactor, says. Josh, Frank's son, smiles. "That's because he doesn't have anything else," he says. Like most teens, Josh rolls his eyes over his dad's interests. Sure, Josh is a good cave diver in his own right, but that doesn't mean he likes it. In fact, he's beginning to hate it. For a month every year, Frank—who long ago separated from Josh's mother—pulls Josh along on one of his dark, dank expeditions into stone and water. Every year, Josh goes … and counts the days until he can return to life topside. Forget father-son bonding: To Josh, it feels more like a master-slave thing. Then, during an expedition to a huge, partially underwater cavern system in New Guinea, something goes amiss. A huge storm sweeps over the region and floods the caverns, trapping Frank, Josh, Carl and two others—Carl's girlfriend, Victoria, and Frank's longtime assistant, George—in the unexplored dark. There's no chance of a rescue.
The rooms they've explored are now blocked and, as Frank tells them, "Everybody up there already thinks we're dead." There's only one option open: Plunge forward through the cave's unexplored cracks and crevasses, gambling that through one of them they'll find a way out.Positive On the surface, Sanctum is a story about a father and son bonding under the very worst of conditions. (And you thought that Cub Scout camping trip was special.) "He's a h‑‑‑ of a fellow, your old man, once you get to know him," George tells Josh. And while Josh is skeptical at first, one of the benefits of being trapped in caves is that it leaves you plenty of opportunity to get to know your estranged, equally trapped relatives. Josh grows to appreciate his father's drive, courage and determination. Frank learns that his son is courageous in his own right—and a pretty nifty kid to boot. On the surface, it's also a story that spends time teaching us to stay calm under pressure, and that our decisions have consequences.
It's about courage and perseverance. "No matter what happens, you never, ever give up," Frank tells Josh. But what lurks underneath the surface in this movie undermines many of those positive messages. Both Frank and Josh do give up, in a extraordinarily tragic way. Spiritual The word sanctum means "holy place," and spiritual allusions, some positive, some negative, hang from the film like stalactites. I'll deal with several comments made about (perceived) gaps in God's presence in my conclusion, but for now, here's a quick, incomplete rundown of some of the remarks that are made: Frank calls the caves "my church." When explorers find one of their team that got lost, the found member says, "Thank God, thank God," and appears to mean it. When Frank begins to lead the way through the unknown caves in a search for light and freedom, he says, "See you on the other side." "Could've picked a better choice of words," George says. Frank and a woman named Judes swim into a massive room that Judes says looks like a cathedral.
Frank quickly dubs it "St. Judes' Cathedral"—just moments before Judes' breathing apparatus comes apart. An aside: St. Jude is revered as the patron saint of desperate causes—a symbolism that's wholly appropriate here.Sexual Victoria, chilled to the bone after a swim through the caves, is forced to strip down to her underwear and huddle underneath an emergency blanket with her also nearly naked boyfriend, Carl. Josh moons a camera. Someone makes a crude allusion to a nun's nether regions.Violent Apparently, there are lots of ways to get killed underground, and the film shows pretty much all of them—often in grotesque detail. When Judes' re-breathing apparatus malfunctions, she panics and drowns. We see her suck in the killing liquid before she stops struggling. Her gray corpse makes a couple of cameos later in the story. Another caver's body is found trapped in the cavern, apparently drowned. Yet another succumbs to "the bends," a painful condition that divers often suffer if they don't go through a lengthy decompression procedure to help their bodies adjust to different pressures.
This particular victim begins coughing up blood before telling Josh to go on without him. Josh assumes he's just taking a rest break, but in reality the man plans to leave the group and die alone so he won't slow the survivors down. Another explorer, hanging from a rope-pulley system, gets her hair tangled up in the contraption … the upshot being that her hair and scalp are pulled slowly and painfully off her head. She whips out a knife and tries to cut herself free, but when she "frees" herself (cutting the wrong thing), she falls to her death (bouncing off cave walls as she goes). We later see her distorted, mutilated corpse. Two explorers get into a fight: One of them falls on top of a stalagmite, which punctures his back. As horrible and graphic as these deaths are, none are morally problematic. The two "mercy killings" we see are. In the first, one of Frank's cavers smashes into a series of walls before plunging into the water below. Josh tries to recover the body, but it floats away, only to resurface a short time later.
Then, the survivors learn, to their horror, that the man is still alive. His body is shattered, his face is half torn away, and bubbles of blood burble from his mouth. Frank, with obvious affection, says goodbye … and holds him under the water. It's not a peaceful release. The man struggles, clutching and grasping as Frank maintains his resolve. "You want to play at being adventurers," he hollers at Carl after the deed's done. It's a tragic death, but it only foreshadows another killing, one that's given even more attention by the filmmakers—and therefore more attention here, in my conclusion.Crude Profane The f-word surfaces more than 30 times, the s-word at least 25. There are several exclamations of "a‑‑," "h‑‑‑," "p‑‑‑ed" and the British profanity "bloody." Characters misuse God's name (pairing it with "d‑‑n" at least three times) and abuse Jesus' name another dozen.Drug Alcohol Frank and Josh share a bottle of booze, brought down to celebrate the team's cave exploration achievements.
A cold Victoria says she wishes she could have brandy. Someone smokes around a bevy of oxygen tanks. Morphine is mentioned, as are more recreational drugs.Other ElementsFrank and Josh have a rocky relationship in the beginning, filled with lots of yelling and swearing and mutual disrespect—Josh at one point accusing his dad of murder. Someone steals the last of the re-breathers, essentially leaving other explorers to die.ConclusionFor thousands of years, cultures around the world have associated death and the afterlife—often the worst sort of afterlife—with caves and the Underworld. The Maya tell of the underground realm of Xibalba, or "place of fear." Superheroes from ancient Greece and Rome were constantly traipsing down to Hades to be tested and tried. Dante's Inferno places hell as an underground realm far from the warmth, light and love of God. The caverns of Sanctum feel much the same. A land of fear and insanity, pain and death. When Carl and Josh fly above the cave mouth in a helicopter, Carl says, "If we go down here, even God won't know where we are."
Later, Frank thunders, "There's no God down here. This place doesn't give a rat's a‑‑ about you, or me, or any of us. We're particles of dust down here." And yet, Frank also calls it his church. "I can hold a mirror up and say this is who I am," he says. The caverns in Sanctum, then, become places where those who don't believe in an outside divinity can search for a spark of it inside themselves. And it will have to be found inside, because in Sanctum's ethos, no one else is watching. These folks are on their own. Frank's church is a purely naturalistic one, a Darwinian one, where the weak succumb and the strong survive … but only to the next day, when new trials await. It is the Church of Self, a place to find what meager transcendence we can find within ourselves, and to live not for purpose, but out of habit.Considering that, is it just sad, or is it somehow fitting that Frank dies in his church? Wounded and weak after fighting with Carl, he turns to Josh and asks for "a little help."