Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on September 2011

A well-equipped team of expert spelunking scuba divers (and for some reason an inexperienced girlfriend) sets out to pointlessly discover how surface water makes its way through the world’s largest cave system (Esa-ala in Papua New Guinea) and to the sea. The team leader (Richard Roxburgh) has to deal with his son’s (Rhys Wakefield) formulaic daddy issues while seeing to it that all remain safe and their objective is met. They soon find themselves in a life-and-death situation when the caves begin to flood due to a surface typhoon, and they start to die unique, imaginative deaths. You know, like they do in flooded-cave movies. It’s in particularly useless 3-D, seeing as the technique darkens the already dark caverns, and the film consists mostly of close-ups anyway. This is being marketed in some places as James Cameron’s Sanctum, but the King of the World was only tangentially involved; one of six executive producers. Overall: despite its shaky continuity and clunky dialogue (and Ioan Griffudd’s acting), this is a competently filmed man-against-nature flick that maintains a reasonable level of tension throughout. Just don’t be expecting The Abyss.