The dark is rising. Just as Dan Richards’ book Overnight shone a spotlight on what happens when most of us are asleep, Robert Petit’s film Underland – loosely based on the Robert Macfarlane book of the same name – illuminates what goes on beneath our feet. Our attention is too frequently focused on the yang, Richards, Petit and Macfarlane seem to suggest; it’s time we dwelled on the yin.
This visually stunning documentary, boasting a beautifully worded narration by Sandra Hüller and an intense complementary score by Hannah Peel, follows three intrepid denizens of the subterranean realm – speleologist/cave archaeologist Fátima Tec Pool, urban explorer Bradley Garrett and theoretical particle physicist Mariangela Lisanti – united by their pursuit of knowledge and revelation.
Lisanti recalls being naturally inquisitive from a very young age, but unlike Tec Pool and Garrett, is not seeking to learn more about the underworld itself. Instead, her mission is to detect dark matter, a substance that has hitherto only been hypothesised due to its apparent effects. Such is the sensitivity of the scientific equipment, Lisanti’s lab has been built two kilometres beneath the earth’s surface and can be contaminated by no more than a teaspoon of dust every year. She is, by her own admission, “hunting for a ghost” – sat in brightly lit rooms, but metaphorically floundering in the dark.
Garrett argues that most of those who indulge in underground exploration do so in the hope of finding something special. That might be true of Lisanti and Tec Pool, but his motivation is somewhat different: to unearth and draw attention to things that end up forgotten and buried, out of sight and too often out of mind – whether that’s wrecked cars flytipped in a cave or evidence of uranium extraction in an abandoned mine. Sometimes, those things can be people, such as those who fall through the cracks in society and wind up living in the storm drains beneath Las Vegas. The rich rise to the top, Garrett observes, and the opposite is true too: “poverty sinks”.
Heavy rainfall can turn these drains into underwater tombs – a horrific manmade equivalent of the flooded caves that Tec Pool and her archaeologist colleagues investigate. Underland tracks Tec Pool’s party as they venture further and further into the depths of the earth with the aid of state-of-the-art scanning tools, squeezing through tiny gaps and at one point stringing up hammocks for a rest. Finally, they reach the end of the cave – only to make the extraordinary discovery that the walls are decorated with handprints made using the charcoal from torches.
While Lisanti harbours ambitions of being a pioneer, for Tec Pool this moment is a humbling reminder that she has been following in the footsteps of her Mayan ancestors all along. Those handprints encapsulate Underland’s underlying message: that we are all connected across time, compelled by shared desires to find out more and to make our own mark on the world.
Dir: Robert Petit (12A, 79 mins)
words BEN WOOLHEAD
