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Neil Marshall’s “The Descent” doesn’t pander to mainstream genre tropes when it comes to its female characters<\/a>. For starters, none of the characters portrayed by the film’s all-female cast are victims of the Madonna-whore complex. Instead, they’re flawed, complex beings who don’t fit into problematic boxes, as their humanity (or lack thereof) is filtered through the horror of confronting something inexplicably evil. These six women aren’t passive bystanders to the horror inside the caves either, as all of them take a survival-first approach, no matter how flawed it turns out to be. They bravely climb down ropes that lead deep inside ancient caverns, squeeze through dangerously narrow rock formations, and hack their way through hordes of monsters if need be.<\/p>\n While “The Descent” has undoubtedly redefined women-centric horror, can Marshall’s film be considered feminist? Shauna Macdonald, who played our grieving protagonist, Sarah, doesn’t think so. In an interview for SFX Magazine’s November 2025 issue<\/a> (which celebrates the film’s groundbreaking 20-year legacy), Macdonald says that calling “The Descent” a feminist movie undermines the nuanced complexity of its central theme:<\/p>\n “A lot of people said, ‘It’s such a feminist movie,’ and I said, ‘Have you seen what we do to each other?’ This was back in the early 2000s, when there was ‘Girl Power’ and the Spice Girls, and people were still talking like that, and saying, ‘The Girl Power Movie.’ It’s really not; it’s a film with complex female characters, and when they face a common foe, their friendships fracture and splinter, and it’s every person for themselves. In ‘Dog Soldiers’, it was a group of squaddies facing a common foe, and they all come together and fight it together, whereas we betray each other.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n So, what is<\/em> “The Descent” all about?<\/p>\n\n