The Tunnel

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A movie for every day of the year – a good one

2 August

Tower Subway opens, 1870

On this day in 1870, the Tower Subway opened in London, UK. Running under the River Thames between Tower Hill on the north bank and Tooley Street on the south, it is a 1,340 foot (410m) tunnel and was the first built under a river expressly to carry a train. Though it caused a lot of excitement at the time, the tunnel was only narrow, at just over 6.5 feet (2.026m) wide, and its tiny train did not have much room for passengers. The company that built it went bust and the tunnel closed at the end of the year it had opened, though it re-opened shortly afterwards as a foot tunnel. This was popular, though narrow – “it is not advisable for any but the very briefest of Her Majesty’s lieges to attempt the passage in high-heeled boots, or with a hat to which he attaches any particular value,” wrote Charles Dickens after using it. In 1897, suffering a loss of traffic after a toll-less Tower Bridge opened just down the river three years before, it closed again. It was at first used for hydraulic power. Now it is used for water mains and telecoms cables.

The Tunnel (2011, dir: Carlo Ledesma)

The mock-doc horror movie has proved to be remarkably resilient, rumours of its death having been on the wind even as The Blair Witch Project was first taking wing. The Tunnel clearly owes a debt to the 1999 movie, but that isn’t a bad thing when it’s done this well.

The story is a fairly straightforward one and it elegantly entirely justifies the constant presence of a camera – often a credulity-straining presence in this sort of film. Yes I’m thinking of Cloverfield. Because the group of unlucky souls we are following are an Australian news crew entering a network of disused tunnels to find out whether the stories of homeless people disappearing down there are true. The tunnels, it seems, are about to be converted into some vast underground water storage facility. And that’s all you need to know before plunging in yourself.

What you’ll find is a film that has arrived late at the mock-doc party and a director (Carlo Ledesma) and writers (Enzo Tedeschi, Julian Harvey) who know they’re going to be judged to a much more exacting standard than the mock-dockers who have gone before. The conceit they wheel out being that we’re watching a post-event assemblage of material, put together for broadcast purposes – so interviews with the survivors, plus bits of YouTube and plenty of CCTV are spliced into the standard handycam footage of… well let’s just say bad stuff.

Whether we need convincing this much, I’m not sure, but the actors add another layer of believability. They’re uniformly excellent, notably Bel Deliá as a punchy, no-nonsense newshound. One of the others, Steve Davis, is in fact a cameraman and the footage we’re watching is the footage he shot. None of this would matter – nor would the fact that the film debuted on BitTorrent with viewers invited to pay what they thought it was worth – if the film wasn’t any good. But it is good, and is even confident enough to do not very much at all for a considerable amount of time (see: The Exorcist and Paranormal Activity for some reasons why this is a good idea) until bits of equipment start disappearing and someone suddenly goes missing.

The great advantage of low-budget shooting methods is that you don’t need to worry too much about special effects. And with the low light levels you’d naturally expect to find in tunnels, it doesn’t take much to generate proper “boo” shocks. Kudos to the writing/production team for deciding to shoot in subterranean Sydney, and for sticking hard to their original rationale. The result is a grim, creepy and atmospheric horror film worth watching at night in the dark on your own.

Why Watch?

  • The crazy BitTorrent angle
  • The believable cast
  • The no-budget inventiveness
  • It’s scary




The Tunnel – Watch it now at Amazon


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© Steve Morrissey 2014


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