Critic Reviews

The well-crafted Beneath proves a taut, atmospheric if not especially deep thriller.

The film is impersonal and populated with wisps of characters who spend most of the running time wandering around in the dark yelling at one another.

Sparing with scares and judicious with gore, the director, Ben Ketai (working from a screenplay by Patrick J. Doody and Chris Valenziano), proves better at summoning atmosphere than developing characters.

Beneath exhausts the appeal of its thinly sketched characters almost as soon as they're trapped together in the mine's emergency bunker, and it isn't long before Ketai, tiring of human drama, turns instead toward the supernatural.

It’s hard to tell who’s who; it doesn’t really matter, because they’re all equally bland, and the threat these ciphers face is almost certainly nonexistent. It’s just about the perfect formula for tedium.

The reductionist plot eventually forces both the protagonists and the filmmakers into a blind shaft without a productive exit strategy.

It simply turns into another slash-and-dice horror flick, replete with enough screams for three more installments of the "Nightmare on Elm Street" franchise.

When does a bad, cheap horror movie becomes something more offensively horrible? When it pegs its generic nonsense on real-life tragedy and becomes exploitation. Ben Ketai’s Beneath, not to be confused with the Larry Fessenden film of the same name from last year, is the kind of mediocrity one finds on The Movie Channel on a Saturday night and pretty easily dismisses.