The archaeology and ancient languages scholar Scarlett has a goal in life: to find the legendary philosopher's stone. After an expedition in the Middle East, during which her father lost his life, the girl learned about the place where the alchemist who would have discovered the secret related to the stone that can transform metals into gold and grant eternal life is buried. The alchemist's tomb, in fact, should be in Paris, in the dense network of catacombs that intertwine beneath the city. Scarlett, along with her friend cameraman Benji, decides to embark on this quest but needs George, her old collaborator and the only one able to translate the Aramaic that covers the inscriptions of the necropolis. The three, however, need a guide who can help them not get lost in the underground tunnels and thus hire Papillon and his group. But what lies hidden in the catacombs of Paris is far more terrible than what the young people could have imagined.
What lies hidden in the underground has always been one of the curiosities that has fueled human imagination. Jules Verne imagined that at the center of the Earth there were gigantic and prehistoric beings, while Dante Alighieri believed the Inferno was located there. It is precisely this second vision, while borrowing from the first the pretext of alchemy, that anchors "Necropolis – The City of the Dead," the new horror film by John Erick Dowdle that turns the catacombs of Paris into an unsettling realm of fears.
Many civilizations attribute to the earth and the underground a necrophoric value, the predestined place to welcome the remains of the deceased, a sacred and respected portion of the planet, which, however, takes on an unsettling hue when imagining a life after death linked precisely to the underground. Whether it is the living dead or the damned of the Inferno, those who live or emerge from the earth either have bad intentions or are a symbol of the evil caused in life. An isolation, whether voluntary or forced, that has fostered the creation of a rather substantial horror imagery, just think of the amount of horror films that tell of monsters or murderous creatures living in the underground: from the murderous homeless of "Don't Take That Train" to the monstrous freak of nature that inhabits the London underground in "Creep – The Surgeon," the terrible cannibal monsters of the diptych "The Descent" and the incestuous mutants of "Hemoglobin – Creatures of Hell," the mole men of the French "La Meute" and those of the classic "In the Temple of Mole Men," the "rat thing" of King's "The Creature in the Cemetery" and the dragons of "The Devil's Hideout." Not to mention the unsettling killer who threatens the protagonists of "Catacombs – The Kingdom of the Dead," which also shares with "Necropolis" the Parisian setting.
John Erick Dowdle, who also wrote the film with his brother Drew and had already tackled horror by signing "Quarantine" and "Devil," decides to break away from the pre-existing and does not choose the easy path of monstrous creatures that might inhabit the underground, but rather the riskier path of leaving the threat on a supernatural and almost abstract plane. The protagonists of the story, venturing into the catacombs of Paris, will be faced with their most intimate fears, and among unsettling female sects and statues that come to life, it is the manifestations of the guilt weighing on the soul of each of them that put the nerves of the characters and the viewer to the test.
Passing through a door that mockingly bears the inscription "Abandon all hope, ye who enter," they voluntarily infiltrate Hell, and the dose of horror and revulsion grows with each passing minute.
A first rather static and repetitive part, in which the characters move among ruins and galleries solving riddles in the manner of Indiana Jones, Lara Croft, or Robert Langdon, is followed by a second, more adrenaline-filled part, with bizarre killings and a crescendo that makes one think of a first-person shooter video game. Indeed, another characteristic of "Necropolis" is the mockumentary technique with which it is made. A technique overused to nausea in contemporary horror, it is true, but in this case perhaps it is an added value because it accentuates the sense of claustrophobia, on which the director focuses heavily, and – for once – justifies the continuous filming even in the most unimaginable moments, given that all characters have a video camera installed on their headgear.
Very interesting is the concept of the mirror vision of things, exhibited from the very title of the film, "As Above, So Below," as above, so below (in heaven as on earth, if we want to apply a Christian point of view), which manages to give the entire film a particular reading and provides the pretext for a series of labyrinthine games that reach their peak in the final "descent." A finale that, however, does not fully satisfy and shows some writing flaws that perhaps could have been avoided if certain things had been handled differently.
"Necropolis – The City of the Dead" remains a rather successful horror film, a spectacle of decent entertainment that has its good moments of tension and boasts an original idea and a development that manages to keep the promise of showing something different from the usual.
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