It’s all going on in the opening scenes of Scurry (2024) as a calamitous event tears a literal hole in the fabric of an American city. At the bottom of a sinkhole which has opened up, an unfortunate man regains consciousness. He’s injured, but he has phone signal, and daylight is auspiciously close. Never mind that: due to a few other unexpected developments, his only option is soon to retreat further into the darkness where, to his shock, he discovers somebody else: a woman. She is almost inevitably injured, too, but there’s more. Unlike Mark (Jamie Costa), Kate (Emalia) has more than a clue about something else which is down there with them.
Kate initially isn’t much interested in teaming up with Mark (and it’s worth adding that their names aren’t given until much later in proceedings; this isn’t a social event). Her reasons for this aren’t delineated at first, but his seemingly paternalistic attitude towards her doesn’t help. He’s not at first much motivated to listen to he what she knows. Needs must, however, and as these two try to make an escape, now via the tunnels beneath the city. They soon come up against a strange, alien threat – a lifeform (a bloody familiar-feeling lifeform, actually).
There are some issues with Scurry, one of which is that it’s hard to keep things interesting once it establishes – very early on, hence no compunction about mentioning it here – that there’s something down there with them in the dark. It’s dark; it’s dangerous; this being known, the film has to work its way through a few rather contrived events to keep the peaks and troughs of peril coming, with a number of false hope moments (instantly recognisable by when exactly they occur in the film’s 100-minute runtime). The threat itself feels a little uneven, too. Is this creature deadly, or just as ill-at-ease down there in the dark, liable to get trapped or outwitted with comparative ease?
However, here’s another horror/sci-fi film with a skeleton cast, limited set and ample darkness which still does enough to potentially endear it to creature feature fans. It’s obviously a very claustrophobic film; possibly, it’s banking on an audience horrified by enclosed spaces and in that, it delivers. The long take approach works too, unfolding in real time with worsening jeopardy, or at the least the strong intimation of that, and decent performances. The fact that Mark and Kate are not instant buddies allows an extra complicating later to be added, and means their character development is more interesting than it might have been.
It’s possible that, based on what’s been written so far, it may be easy to spot a few similarities to other projects. Chief amongst those is The Descent, even if there’s not much descending overall, but there are shades of Cloverfield here, some Glorious in places, and without a shadow of a doubt, the creature design resembles a certain semi-comedic, militaristic creature flick from the 1990s, which hardly needs to be named. The creatures themselves, mostly rendered in CGI, are unfortunately a real weak link in the film, but it’s not the design per se; it’s the clear and obvious way that they’re not really there, and thus hard to read as a real threat. Similarly, the most significant injuries are CGI too, so there’s a surprising paucity of blood and dirt in a film where people are being menaced by bugs underground.
But, hey: even without reinventing the genre, Scurry clearly has some affection for it, and is written in such a way that a range of developments can unfold across the runtime. Fans willing to overlook a few things for the sake of a new film in their genre of choice will find enough here to entertain them, even if it’s unlikely to convert new viewers to the joys of subterranean sci-fi all by itself.
Scurry (2024) hit digital platforms on October 3rd.