Underland

Every wondered what’s going on beneath your feet? Not in a fretful ‘is the Northern Line on the blink again?’ way but in the awestruck, Jules Verne-ish sense. To marvel at the thought of the planet’s crust extending 40-odd miles straight down. Acolytes of Robert Macfarlane’s acclaimed 2019 travelogue, Underland, will have. Viewers of this ghostly, lyrical documentary adaptation will share that wonder. 

‘Why do we seek the void?’ is the treatise spelt out early by British filmmaker Robert Petit (Upstream). His camera seeks answers in some of the planet’s loneliest, most inaccessible corners. Accompanied by Hannah Peel’s ethereal score and haunting sound design, his brisk journey to the centre of the Earth is a film of transcendent moments that never quite coalesces, like volcanic rock, into a unified whole.

The answers to that question – science, poverty, thrill-seeking, anthropology, survival – are uncovered by following people who seek the same answers: an archaeologist exploring Mayan culture in the caves of Yucatán; a theoretical physicist trying to isolate dark matter in a lab at the bottom of a Canadian mine shaft; and an urban explorer risking drowning in a Las Vegas storm drain. 

Sandra Hüller (Project Hail Mary) narrates the Mayan section, which has the mythic, claustrophobic quality of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. Across the American landmass, meanwhile, the quest for dark matter spins into existential angst as American scientist Mariangela Lisanti on a lifelong journey with no guaranteed endpoint.

The photography is spectacular

The most gripping section is also, in geological terms, the shallowest. Subterranean geographer Bradley Garrett is a guide through the parts of Vegas no one ever sees: the storm drains just below the surface where sudden rainfall translates into an immediate death trap, but where some of the city’s homeless still choose to live. Money rises, Garrett notes, and poverty sinks. It’s a stark visual metaphor for the topography of society. 

The photography is spectacular. Petit and his crew have abseiled, crawled and waded through the darkness to chart the earth’s shadowy recesses. Tree roots cascade into chasms, tendrils wrap around rock formations, and an old English tree is a gateway to a deep rent in the planet. It doesn’t even need the skeletons of Paris’s catacombs to bring a touch of Lovecraftian horror to this vision of a mythical realm. Why do we seek the void? Sometimes it seeks us. 

In UK and Ireland cinemas Fri Mar 27.