- Director: Arseny Syuhin
- Writers: Samuel Stewart Hunter, Arseny Syuhin
- Stars: Milena Radulovic, Sergey Ivanyuk, Nikolay Kovbas
- Run Time: 1 hour, 55 Minutes
Synopsis
A man in a black and white flashback coughs up blood and dies in the hospital. It was a preliminary test of a vaccine, and it’s not going well. She wants to pull the plug on future tests, but her commander says that man would have died for nothing if she quits now. We flash forward to the present, and Anya has been credited with curing the disease.
We see Gorbachev come on TV to give some context about when this takes place. In the middle of this, Anya gets a call about a mysterious incident at the Superior Hole. There was a strange noise 12,000 feet below the surface, in the world’s deepest borehole, and then twenty people went missing. It’s a secret research lab twelve kilometers beneath the surface of the Earth. There’s a report of a previously unknown disease, and they want her to go down there and get a sample of whatever it is.
They land the helicopter at the frozen base and see an infected man staggering toward the copter. The men on the copter shoot him, but he gets back up. The man has a grenade and blows himself up. Anya hurries outside to get a blood sample. One of the survivors from down below says “They’re lying. It’s not a disease. Go back to your family while you still have time. It’s Hell down there, that’s what they found.”
They get in the big elevator and strap in. The reverse brakes break, and they’re soon in free fall, then they all pass out. It looks like this is a trick by the head scientist to knock everyone out and steal the suitcase with the samples and the keycard for the elevator. They’re at 5,220 meters down. There’s a second lab level at the bottom, but they can’t get there without the key card.
The door is welded shut, and there is writing on the wall, “Demons Here” and “Insatiable Hunger.” Also, it’s supposed to be 200 degrees at the Botton of the shaft. The door opens, and a woman named Olga walks out. She walked all the way up from the lowest level, through all that heat. Her back is mutated and rotted looking. They take a sample and see that it’s a cellular parasite. Olga starts glowing with an internal heat.
The head scientist, who stole the samples, decides to blow up the tunnel, causing damage even on their level. In an hour, the pressure will destroy the whole place. By the time they return to the infirmary, Olga has mutated and her algae/mold infection has literally covered the walls. Anya and her guard are shot rather thoroughly with spores. The base doctor was also infected, and she starts sprouting big spiky bones out of her skin. They get out, Anya puts on a gas mask, but the guard is clearly infected.
Anya figures out that the parasite hates the cold, since it evolved deep below the surface. The colonel wants those sample returned to base so they can use it as a weapon to save the failing Soviet Republic. They want the infected security guard to make it to Moscow. The guard says, “Please make sure no one dies because of me.”
The soldiers move on into the tunnel, and the civilians remain behind. There was something big down there that they shot but didn’t kill. Some of them make it back, but others return in pieces. “You shouldn’t have opened the door. Now it knows where we are,” one of the soldiers says.
Finally, the elevator comes back up from the lower level. They need to go down to find the scientist with the key card that lets them go up. They get to the bottom, and it’s all frozen, not hot like they expected. The parasite absorbs the heat. They play a recording that explains that this alien thing was stopped millions of years ago by the permafrost, and that it wants out. It learned how to melt bodies together. Someday, someone is going to come back to this base, and that would be a catastrophe.
The colonel realizes that this thing can’t be released or taken to the surface. He then puts on the defective heat suit and goes out into the 200-degree section after the dead scientist with the keycard, but he doesn’t make it back. Anya goes out next, completely unprotected, finds the Colonel’s body and the keycard her recovered. Anya, however, is not bothered as much by the heat; she must be pretty badly infected already.
Peter, the scientists who has been hanging back the whole time, shoots the engineer in the leg and demands the key “This will be my biggest discovery ever,” he explains. The three remaining survivors return to the middle level. Something big eats or absorbs Peter. It’s big and it’s covered in the faces of the people it absorbed. Anya douses herself in cold water so it doesn’t see her, and then she has to crawl under the creature. She finds Niklay, who is not dead yet either, and they get into the elevator as the creature chases them.
They find the guard that was infected, mostly mutated in the elevator and ready to release his spores. Anya and Niklay argue over whether or not to continue to the surface and probably infect the world. The guard uses the last of his humanity to kill Nikolay and let Anya do the right thing.
Anya then enters the wrong password into the keypad three times, which starts the self-destruct sequence, dropping the elevator full-speed to the bottom. Except she gets to the surface and medical personnel pull her out before it drops. We know that she’s completely infected. She grabs one of the soldiers grenade, but we see a soldier come up behind her and… fade to black.
Commentary
This is Russian-made and clearly dubbed, but it’s a good dubbing job this time. Still, the main character talks with a heavy Russian accent, and she’s a little hard to understand, for no particular reason, since she’s the only one with an accent.
The setting is horror-film perfection. In an icy Russian wasteland, there’s a 12-kilometer deep tunnel with one elevator shaft. You don’t get more isolated than that anywhere on Earth. It may as well be set in outer space.
The creature design is a cross between the creature from “The Thing” (1980) meets the Absorbaloff from Doctor Who. I could see why bullets wouldn’t stop the thing due to its size, but it doesn’t really look fast enough to chase anybody.
I liked it a lot. It’s a really slow burn. There’s nothing you haven’t seen here before, but it’s just foreign enough to be interesting.