{"id":494545,"date":"2026-03-25T13:35:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-25T13:35:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/494545\/"},"modified":"2026-03-25T13:35:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-25T13:35:08","slug":"underland-review-poetic-exploration-of-life-deep-beneath-the-earths-surface-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/494545\/","title":{"rendered":"Underland review \u2013 poetic exploration of life deep beneath the Earth\u2019s surface | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are some arresting questions and potent images in Rob Petit\u2019s ruminative essay-documentary Underland, based on Robert Macfarlane\u2019s bestselling book of the same name<\/a> about the spaces under the Earth\u2019s surface and what they tell us \u2013 or withhold from us \u2013 about human existence and the Anthropocene.<\/p>\n

Mexican archaeologist F\u00e1tima Tec Pool descends into a cenote<\/a>, a freshwater sinkhole, on the Yucatan peninsula, the entry point to a mysterious subterranean zone; these were revered by the Maya people as Xibalba<\/a>, the underworld, and once upon a time explored by them using just firelight. Meanwhile, theoretical physicist Mariangela Lisanti studies dark matter in a special ultra-clean facility constructed miles below the Earth\u2019s surface in Canada, and urban explorer Bradley Garrett roams the scary and dark storm-drain tunnels below Las Vegas and discovers evidence that people live there; poor people driven underground.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

These experiences are interspersed by Sandra H\u00fcller reading portentous and borderline-silly prose poetry about the \u201cnether\u201d in a faintly Americanised accent; perhaps the images should have been allowed to speak for themselves. The film raises intriguing, if disparate, ideas and perhaps fails to acknowledge the fundamental difference between natural underground spaces and those that are human-made. Caves like the ones in Yucatan exist in the vast reaches of deep time \u2013 but not places like the abandoned cold war bunkers where we see dusty newspapers from 1978. The most disquieting scenes, for me, are those showing Lisanti\u2019s work searching for dark matter, and acknowledging, with hardly a tremor of concern, that all this work miles below the Earth\u2019s crust may not yield anything in her lifetime. Perhaps Lisanti herself is succumbing to deep time.<\/p>\n

Underland is in UK and Irish cinemas from 27 March.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are some arresting questions and potent images in Rob Petit\u2019s ruminative essay-documentary Underland, based on Robert Macfarlane\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":494546,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-494545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=494545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494545\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/494546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=494545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=494545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=494545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}