Rated R

Yes, the posters have Jim Cameron’s name plastered all over them, but don’t let the marketing monkeys deceive you. Cameron, who pretty much just donated the submersible cameras used by director Alister Grierson, had next to nothing to do with the story, filming or editing of “Sanctum.” To him, this movie surely represented an easy opportunity to grab some exposure for the underwater and 3D camera tech he’s been inventing for the last 20 years (evidently, the $300 billion “Avatar” haul wasn’t quite validation enough). What saves “Sanctum” from sinking into a trivial 90-minute infomercial, though, is fairly surprising. We’ll get to that soon enough, but, as in the film, you’ll need to hold your breath for a bit.

The premise, in which a team of subterranean explorers is driven by a freak tempest into the labyrinthine depths of a exceptionally deep, exceedingly wet cave and forced to devise an escape route through uncharted and thoroughly flooded tunnels, is very loosely based on the experiences of Australian scuba aficionado and long-time Cameron sherpa Andrew Wight. Though this is his first time taking pen to paper, one gets the feeling Wight has spent a great amount of time loudly spinning mean fish stories for the blokes down at the saloon. In his time, the man has unquestionably seen his fair share of amazing, but there’s very little reality at work in this extravagantly embellished version of his “that time I got caught in a pit” story. 

Dubious veracity aside, Wight’s characters yield the barest approximation of personality, and don’t remotely deserve the plodding 20-minute introduction he affords them. Their motivations are so shallow a puddle couldn’t form in them, and they spit out dialogue that sounds suspiciously like it was written in crayon. The humans at the center of this adventure are almost actively disinteresting, but here’s the weird bit: it kind of works. 

The core of this story is not, against all conventional storytelling logic, concerned with any specific connection to the people on screen, but instead, and on a much larger canvas, to the palpable, suffocating dread of being trapped in a hopeless and impossible situation. The very banality of the players provides an intriguingly blank slate for an audience to project themselves onto. When the deluge comes and the masks go on, the agony of their stilted repartee is replaced with only the muted noise of gurgling water, grinding stone and hissing oxygen tanks. The effect is at once soothing and horrifying. As we’re crushed deeper and deeper into the void and the most basic of necessary resources—food, air, warmth, light—are inexorably replaced with desperation, claustrophobia, pressure and confusion, the film very successfully relates an inescapable profundity that no matter how smart, tough, prepared or equipped you might be, our glorious Earth will punish you simply for existing on it. And if you happen to be smart, tough, prepared and equipped, you may live just a little bit longer to get punished some more. Mother Nature simply doesn’t care.

As exaggerated as the facts of this story may be, it’s pretty fabulous that a movie that so flaunts its exploratory spirit would boldly delve into themes that Hollywood traditionally would find too threatening, possibly too real, to even address. It digs down to a very visceral place where survival is the single, solitary consideration, and standard morality just gets in the way. As sinister as it sounds, in the stale and predictable landscape we’ve come to expect from contemporary cinema, looking on as drowning, suicide, and burgling the dead become feasible and acceptable tools for the “good” guys is really quite a breath of fresh air.