Screening at Tribeca: Robert Petit’s ‘Underland’
Despite its scant 79-minute runtime, Robert Petit’s thrilling, unnerving documentary Underland plays like a sprawling epic about the scope of human existence. Set between several underground realms across the world—old and new, natural and manmade and pristine and discarded—it traces various chapters of the human story through the things we bury, build and leave behind.
Based on Robert Macfarlane’s 2019 nonfiction bestseller Underland: A Deep Time Journey, Petit’s movie employs soft, poetic voiceover from Sandra Hüller (The Zone of Interest) to set the stage for its subterranean exploration. An enormous ash tree with a cavern opening at its base plays host to fleeting fables about humanity’s penchant for descending into the Earth—a sensation mirrored by the camera’s floating, untethered feeling and its dropping motions to introduce us to its beguiling real locales.
Petit and cinematographer Ruben Woodin Dechamps imbue each setting with haunting and ethereal sensations, as light illuminates the contours of each new surface up close. A trio of Mexican cave divers guides us through a winding, breathtaking cave seldom seen by human eyes in the last few millennia, with its own unique ecosystem thriving in the dark. An American explorer traces the remnants of underground societies in Las Vegas’ sprawling, grungy storm drains, whose invisible outcasts frequently outrun floods. In Canada, a sterile, miles-deep facility plays host to quiet physics experiments aimed at unlocking the secrets of space by detecting dark matter—the hidden hums of the universe. And in a dangerous, undisclosed location, a camera drone navigates what humans cannot, exploring radioactive caverns used to mine uranium, the key ingredient in nuclear bombs.
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From cave artwork dating back to early humans to signs meant to warn our descendants of radiation ten thousand years in the future, Underland centers the various symbols created throughout humanity’s brief history in order to illuminate our bittersweet story. Creation and destruction exist in symbiosis, as the movie’s editors (David G. Hill, Anna Price, Andy R. Worboys and Julian Quantrill) weave stealthily between locations while employing brief archival footage to craft connective montages. The resultant rhythms place the film alongside the best nonfiction cinematic explorations of our species—like Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi and Ron Fricke’s Baraka—and provide a space for viewers to ruminate on the allure of these great voids throughout our history.
The Mayans who once traversed the Mexican caves created stories of a religious underworld, which bears similarities to numerous other ancient cultures (among them, the Greeks and the Romans). However, Petit further extends these connective threads across past and present, twining the search for meaning through myth and deity in early civilization with the modern quest for answers through scientific study. These vastly different modes of exploration have both led humanity down into terrifying depths, an irony that Underland frames without a hint of cynicism. It remains devoted to depicting both the ancient and the novel—the ritualistic and the technological—with the same awestruck reverence.
UNDERLAND ★★★1/2 (3.5/4 stars) |
Roots diving deep into the Earth are shot up close with the same curiosity as machines plunged into underwater pools in the hopes of detecting invisible particles that might answer questions of our origins.
Traditionally, documentary filmmaking is presentational in form. Its aesthetics exist in service of some larger point or thesis. While this is technically true of Underland, Petit’s artistic approach is both representational—in that each surface becomes a focused, concentrated symbol for larger narratives that have defined human existence—and in strange ways, invitational. Through its exploration of spaces rarely put to film, the movie urges a more thoughtful meditation on our fraught link to nature and to the world at large, collapsing past and present into a single point on screen.