The Cave

The sound of explo­sives rat­tle in the back­ground; clouds of thick grey smoke bil­low across the frame. The drone-mount­ed cam­era dives between the rub­ble, bur­row­ing deep under­ground. It’s just about the most dra­mat­ic open­ing imag­in­able, dis­play­ing a show­man­ship that sign­posts a dif­fer­ent film to the one that fol­lows. Despite what this first shot might sug­gest, Feras Fayyad’s Syr­ia-set The Cave is less inter­est­ed in action than its after­math, depict­ing the behind-the-scenes strug­gles of peo­ple caught with­in a war with­out a fore­see­able end.

As a Syr­i­an who was impris­oned by Pres­i­dent Assad after mak­ing his first short film, Fayyad is bet­ter posi­tioned to tell this sto­ry than most. Fol­low­ing his release and relo­ca­tion to Copen­hagen, Fayyad direct­ed the Oscar-nom­i­nat­ed Last Men in Alep­po, a fea­ture that fol­lows a vol­un­teer search-and-res­cue group work­ing to uncov­er civil­ians trapped under rub­ble after being on the receiv­ing end of the same sort of airstrikes seen in the open­ing of The Cave.

Here, he digs even deep­er under­ground, bury­ing below what one indi­vid­ual in the film calls ​“the death lurk­ing on the sur­face” to observe the work­ings of an under­ground hos­pi­tal in Ghou­ta. The last refuge with­in a city bombed beyond recog­ni­tion, it is at once a treat­ment facil­i­ty and a sort of strong­hold that itself is the tar­get of reg­u­lar attacks. As with Last Men in Alep­po, whilst the Syr­i­an civ­il war is the film’s sub­ject, it fea­tures only so much in the way that it affects the peo­ple of Syr­ia: the indi­vid­ual human costs are pri­ori­tised over the broad­er nation­al picture.

And also like that film, The Cave has a per­son­al cen­tre. For the most part, the film’s three cin­e­matog­ra­phers remain locked onto Amani Bal­lor, a young doc­tor who has been elect­ed as the hospital’s man­ag­er, a role which sees her not just under immense pres­sure but con­sid­er­able scruti­ny too: atti­tudes towards women and work remain regres­sive, and her remark­able efforts some­times go under-appre­ci­at­ed. Nev­er­the­less, her resilience pre­vails, giv­ing the film (and the facil­i­ty) a spine and a struc­ture. When told by a patient that she should stay at home and cook, her reply is curt and clear: ​“No one tells me what to do.”

In Last Men in Alep­po, Fayyad depict­ed his char­ac­ters as bod­ies with­in a land­scape, cap­tur­ing them with widescreen, Steadicam images that had a beau­ty that sat at uneasy odds with the often hor­rif­ic mate­r­i­al onscreen. With The Cave, the focus is tighter, oper­at­ing with a fly-on-the-wall style that is cramped, claus­tro­pho­bic and always mobile – nec­es­sar­i­ly scrap­py in both com­po­si­tion and motion.

It has its own ten­sions, how­ev­er, with con­flicts aris­ing between this inti­mate, vérité-inspired approach and the director’s more bom­bas­tic urges. Cloy­ing sound­track cues (Mozart’s ​‘Lac­rimosa’, to take one exam­ple, plus an overblown score from elec­tron­ic musi­cian Matthew Her­bert), over-engi­neered sound design, and a some­what unsub­tle final sequence, for instance, under­mine what is oth­er­wise seri­ous, sol­id obser­va­tion­al material.

Nev­er­the­less, these things do not desta­bilise what is oth­er­wise a care­ful­ly craft­ed film about the brav­ery of ordi­nary peo­ple oper­at­ing under incom­pa­ra­ble strain. While much of the world now looks away, Feras Fayyad con­tin­ues to show the Syr­i­an civ­il war as it is rarely seen, mak­ing cin­e­mat­ic non-fic­tion films that serve both as por­traits of the peo­ple most afflict­ed by the con­flict, and as hard to ignore calls-to-atten­tion to those who might not oth­er­wise hear about them.