Jaden Jordan
- Aug 1, 2019
- 4 min read

As Above So Below (2014)

Updated: Aug 3, 2021

The Breakdown: When their quest leads them to the Parisian catacombs, a team of archeologists and their documentarian find themselves in a nightmare.

Watch If: You love archeological and treasure hunt films

Not If: You like your stories to make sense, or you're looking for something scary.

SECONDARY FACTS

Overall Rating: 2.8

Length: 1:33

Language: English

Country: USA

Gore Factor: 3/5

REVIEW

THE QUICK AND DIRTY

As Above So Below is a fun existentialist film, but it isn't scary, and certain decisions open more speculative doors than they even try to address or rectify. It is enjoyable though, as long as you don't think too hard, or if you have a flair for philosophical conceptualization.

PREMISE: 3

I am 100% onboard for pretty much any archeological movie. It's a subject that had always fascinated me, and it offers an actually logical reason why the main character is willingly descending into the catacombs past where anyone would think to look for them. It also adds a good backdrop for her otherwise sociopathic behavior. Unfortunately, the conceptual aspects that get introduced as the film progresses, only manage to delineate the plot, creating complicated plot hole after complicated plot hole, and culminating is a tepidly satisfying sudo-ending that left me far more interested in what happened after the events of the film than what happened during it.

ACTING: 3

I fully admit that I spent a good third of this movie trying to figure out why I recognized Perdita Weeks (Scarlett). The answer was Penny Dreadful. But overall, the acting in As Above, So Below was pretty good. Not necessarily life changing, but all of the actors could hold there own, and managed to filter out most of the cheesy, cult potential that could have easily hijacked this movie.

VISUALS: 3

I am a big fan of claustrophobic cinematography, particularly in horror films, and this one has some amazing scenes. The idea of being in tiny spaces deep below the earth's surface, is enough to give your breath that slight, vaguely panicked weight, and the tight corners and cramped crawlspaces of the setting, especially when paired with the way the camera almost seemed to be in the characters' way.

Where this film looses points is with the jump scares. There is one, off the top of my head, that didn't feel like a half-hearted attempt to force some horror into an otherwise fine dark-action movie. Now, I want to be clear- I have nothing against jump scares. But if your jump scare relies of loud noises or poorly timed lunge shots, they're just lazy. Good jump scares favor contextual tension and a culmination of long-standing dread. Unfortunately, this film isn't the kind of scary that works well with the former.

ATMOSPHERE: 3

As Above, So Below has a quick, energized pacing that makes it easy to watch, but the advertising really shot this film in the foot. It was marketed as a horror, and the trailers certainly painted it as a fright-filled decent into terror, when, in reality, it favors existential dread and vague confusion over in your face terror, and honestly would have benefited from a more decisive tonal direction. What we end up with is instead an action/horror hybrid that was almost great but had a few too many misses to be really excellent. It doesn't help that the few jump scares that are in the film are peppered awkwardly amidst the archeological puzzles and story leaps, in such a way that it honestly feels like the studio watched the final film and said 'Archeological adventures are dead: Make it a horror," peppered it with some watered down surprises, and called it a day.

DELIVERY: 2

THIS SECTION CONTAINS SPOILERS

I recommend that you skip this section if you have not seen the film. So, there are so many conceptual doors opened in this movie that are never explored- and I just need to rant about it. So most of this story relies on the premise that, not only is The Stone of Nicolas Flammel real (which is fine, archeological myth quests, it fits,) but also that it is, in fact, magical. But not just that it's magical, but that the stone was within her the entire time. Which causes me a few problems: If the world is as she believes it to be, are the people that died only dead because she decided they should be? Was she magic before the touched the fake stone? Is everyone magic, or just her? Did she actually solve any puzzles, or did the solutions she gave only work because she believed they should? Are the weird hallucinations actually hell, or some weird stone bullshit, or a pocket of hallucinogenic gas that they stumbled into? Are the people they find down there because it's actually hell, or because someone in the party thinks it's hell, or because she thought it made sense. If the later, how did she know about the guy dying in the car- and on that note, how and why did that ghost guy tell her and George to find Papillon in the first place? Was she actually dead the entire time, having been crushed in the Iranian demolition scene in the begging of the film? Did George die in that Turkish prison? Why, when they get out, do they not immediately assume they're in some hellish other-world? Did the cult in the beginning of the caves not have anything to do with it? What was the deal with La Taupe? Why do none of the cavers act like they know anything about caving?