The American dream backfires in grand style in this poetic, often fascinating tale of tragedy. The suffocating aura of indescribable, almost irrational dread in this movie comes much closer to the flavor of H. P. Lovecraft's darkest writings than any of the movies actually adapted from that author's work. A newly married couple with a 6-month-old son buys an isolated Kansas farm which contains a mysteriously barren acre of flat, lifeless land. Late at night, a shapeless black shadowy mass emerges from the ground and swallows up nearby residents and passersby. The victims' screams and moans can occasionally be heard coming from underground, but no physical trace of them can be found. Some people from the nearby town are contaminated by the unknown force and released, doomed to live out the rest of their lives as aged, hopeless husks of their former selves in constant danger of becoming as dehydrated as the lifeless patch of land itself. When the newlyweds' infant son disappears one night, their lives begin a downward spiral nothing can reverse. While the bulk of the story focuses its attention on the crumbling marriage of the protagonists and the husband's degeneration into an insufferably bad-tempered, controlling (and possibly two-timing) creep, the nameless evil works as a metaphor for their ruined lives as it continues to literally suck the life out of everyone and evrything in its reach. The unexplained underground monster functions rather disturbngly as a comment (warning?) on the ability of smalltown life (and especially farm life) to destroy the hopes and dreams of ordinary people who can be made through trying circumstances to give up on their expectations of perfect little lives and eventually find themselves resigned to emptily plugging along in their own personal, inescapable ruts, deprived of their youth and left with thirsts that can never be sated. Horror fans accustomed to special effects-driven mayhem may be bored by the movie's relative lack of violent incident, but this unnerving look into the depths of sadness and loss is more shuddery and challenging than any half-dozen of Hollywood's top horrors. Which is not to say, of course, that it's a perfect film. The pace honestly does flag from time to time, there are way too many repeated flash cuts of spooky imagery, the acting is inconsistent and the characters don't always behave with great intelligence. Tighter editing would have helped a lot. And then there's the lack of any rational explanation for the evil that haunts the field, which will be seen as frustrating to those who prefer straightforward storytelling over nightmare metaphor. But in the case of a psychological tale like this that wants to get into your head rather than simply shock you, any literal explanation for the story's malignant supernatural force seems almost superfluous. It might only have served to distract viewer attention away from the emotional and very personal nature of the horror at hand. This eerie tale may not make much sense on a literal level but as a gloomy exploration of misguided emotions and wasted lives it's dead-on, concluding on a devastating note that chillingly feels like the only way this scenario could possibly have played out. The director was only 27.
