Descent

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

One of the most striking films to come out of the Tribeca Film Festival, Descent stars Rosario Dawson as Maya, a college student whose generally mundane existence spirals downward and ultimately toward revenge after she suffers a brutal rape. It's not the easiest film to sit through, especially at nine in the morning, which is when I saw it. But it has a hypnotic quality, and the performances elevate it above the exploitative nature of the subject matter. (You can check out our Tribeca coverage of the film here.)

The inevitable lead-up to her rape begins when she meets Jared, a charming but strange football player who uses his offbeat weirdness as an act to woo girls - he likes to spout off lines like "You ever see how they look at you like a juicy plum their dry mouths aren't permitted to touch?" Maya is drawn to this pseudo-eclectic, and Chad Faust, the guy who plays him, is fantastic. He hits just the right notes in these early scenes to make him seem like a creep to which girls would still find themselves attracted.

Then he rapes her one night, and Maya goes into her Descent. At first, her character was quiet and moody for not too many reasons, like many college kids are, but with the dawn of the second act of the film, Dawson gets to show off how good of an actress she is. She has a star quality that allows her to carry a movie effortlessly, which she uses to good effect here, in which she shuns college in favor of drugs, drunkenness, and promiscuity. (It's a cycle that is striking in that it apparently happens with many real-life rape cases.) Many other actors would lose audiences' sympathies, but she always remains compelling.

Without Dawson, the film would feel a bit lost in this middle half, in which not much really happens. She gets a job at a clothing store. She dances in slow motion at a club. She meets an imposing bartender (Marcus Patrick) with whom she has an ambiguous relationship.

The film springs to live again when a new college semester begins, Maya buckles down and becomes a teaching assistant, and Jared re-emerges. He's completely unchanged, still a jock, still a predator, but something is different, this time: he seems more vulnerable now that he's not putting on the tortured-soul act for Maya. And when the two meet up again, Maya almost seems like the stronger of the two.

Thus the pieces are put in motion for an act of revenge which I really can't say