Buried deep within Neil Marshall’s The Lair is a stripped-down, claustrophobic and frightening monster thriller. An intense journey of lean storytelling where tough characters clash with malevolent adversaries in dark spaces, with eruptions of gruesome violence and lacings of dark humour. Or if you like, Marshall’s previous film Dog Soldiers meets Marshall’s previous film The Descent. Unfortunately, the film that actually is The Lair is not that journey, which makes it a very frustrating watch because it is easy to see what might have been.
The Lair was the opening film of 2022’s FrightFest, a festival that also screened a new 4K release of Dog Soldiers and, back in 2005, featured The Descent. While it is reductive and simplistic to credit everything in a film to its director, it is hard to ignore the legacy of Neil Marshall, whose work always offers promise to horror fans. Yet this promise is consistently not realised, as Doomsday, Centurion, Hellboy, The Reckoning and now The Lair have failed to impress audiences as much as his first two efforts. While The Lair does feature flashes of Marshall’s skill at claustrophobia and gore, it is severely weighed down with unnecessary backstories, mechanical plotting and some truly baffling choices.
Set in 2017, we are introduced to Royal Air Force pilot Lieutenant Kate Sinclair (Charlotte Kirk, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Marshall). Shot down in Afghanistan, Sinclair takes refuge in an underground bunker, only to discover some seriously monstrous inhabitants, the tunnels and creatures echoing The Descent. Upon escaping, she reaches a joint US/UK camp occupied by a motley crew, described by Sinclair as ‘the Dirty Half-Dozen’, who echo Dog Soldiers. From here, tensions, violence and audience annoyance escalate.
… the extraneous elements of The Lair add up to an overstuffed, overdone and ultimately unconvincing hodgepodge of generic tropes and cliches.
The film’s setting is genuinely interesting, since it works as a post-Gulf War II film that also harks back to the Cold War since the bunker dates from the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Had the film been made twenty years ago, it would likely relate to Vietnam, set in South East Asia or the US and referencing the strange things that went on in the jungle. Marshall and Kirk also throw in conspiracy theories about crashed UFOs, which echoes The X-Files among other cultural references.
Some of these aspects, such as human experimentation and different forms of neo-colonialism, are presented with po-faced seriousness, both from the cast and the visual style. But at other times, the film veers clumsily into almost self-parody, such as attempts at pithy wisecracks – ‘That was some fucked-up shit!’ – slo-mo shots of our tooled-up heroes that would not look out of place in a Fast and Furious film – and some frankly painful character backstories. Horror and action are often at their best with a simple plot and minimal character, because this allows for focus and therefore intensity. From low-budget affairs like Swallowed to massive blockbusters like Top Gun: Maverick, a close focus on the immediate experiences of the characters in extraordinary situations allows the viewer to engage with those characters and experience those situations. But the extraneous elements of The Lair add up to an overstuffed, overdone and ultimately unconvincing hodgepodge of generic tropes and cliches.
The character biographies are stretched to the point of caricature, from Sinclair not always behaving like a soldier to Major Roy Finch (Jamie Bamber) who seems to have been drafted in from a different film. These characterisations are made worse with ear-scraping accents and laboured dialogue, while the various backstories, including the UFO and the experience of the most interesting character – Kabir (Hadi Khanjanpour) – feel like trying to hit a multitude of points but missing all of them. While there are some half-decent action sequences, the scenes of combat resemble poor video game aesthetics as shooters suddenly run across spaces firing vaguely at the camera. The creature design offers little beyond menacing shapes with lots of teeth, and while there are some gory scenes the tonal lurches from grim to fun to humorous robbing the film of suspense. A central set piece works as a mechanical device rather than organic development, and there are some eye-rollingly leery shots of Kirk’s unnecessarily exposed body, made all the more peculiar when Kirk is both Marshall’s partner and the co-writer.
Fascinatingly, the first twenty minutes of the film could have been expanded into a feature, easily within the 96 minutes of the actual film. It is all the more frustrating that this part of the film works as a monster movie when the rest does not because of overwriting. Occasional visceral moments are spoiled by an intrusive score, all of which serve to remind the viewer again and again that less can be more. It is arguable to Marshall should not repeat his earlier efforts, but as a counterpoint, those early films worked. Marshall has become like Quentin Tarantino – cramming in too much at the cost of the simplicity that made his earlier work so effective. Fans may continue to hold out hope for a return to form, but The Lair is not it.
The Lair (2022) drops on SHUDDER tomorrow
