Underland: a visually stunning journey through a subterranean world

Robert Petit’s Underland is about the mysteries below the earth’s surface. Rather than a straightforward, scientific examination of the planet’s subterranean world, the hybridic documentary is instead a meditation on the people who are drawn to explore it, their respective missions and even their dreams. Based on Robert MacFarlane’s book Underland: A Deep Time Journey, the film is produced by Darren Aronofsky and is divided into chapters, each beginning with grainy celluloid imagery and narration by Sandra Hüller. It then intercuts between the travails of three experts of the underground: one looking for the distant past, another the more recent past and yet another the eternal. 

Fatima Tec Pool, a Mexican archaeologist, descends into a Yucatan cenote with her team, exploring and measuring a cave that was thought to be sacred to the Mayans. Part Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), part The Descent (2005), the sections shot in Mexico are the most visually arresting – with footage of the team crawling through incredibly narrow, low-lit spaces – and the most conclusive, with an impressive discovery of ancient handprints set in pulverised charcoal and preserved by a calcium layer for thousands of years. 

Bradley Garrett, an urban explorer, is searching for and documenting a more recent history in the sewers of Las Vegas. His perspective is both anthropological and artistic and he finds a unique intersection where unseen narratives of human habitation, brutal economic stratification (the haves above and the have nots below), and the strange beauty of detritus meet. Later, in a cave in an undisclosed location, Garrett reveals a respiratory of discarded uranium, which glows under the black light of the drone he remotely pilots through the radioactive area, providing perhaps the film’s most pointed statement on the violence humans have done to the earth. In a Canadian underground research laboratory, Mariangela Lisanti, a theoretical particle physicist, looks for the universe’s origins, running experiments to detect dark matter. The conditions are ideal for the sensitive work, shielding them from cosmic rays and background radiation, but Lisanti’s tests are inconclusive and frustrating, leaving the scientist with more questions than answers.  

In fact, the notion of having more questions than answers characterises the film. Though it features a host of stunning visual imagery (and some less stunning digital graphics at its conclusion), much of the voiceover feels fairly boiler plate and somewhat superficial – especially for a topic that is supposed to be, by its very nature, deep. But Underland is less concerned with information than it is wonder and at its best, it seeks to put the viewer in this state.  

► Underland is in UK cinemas 27 March.