“This thing that we’re looking for has never been directly detected,” Mariangela Lisanti, a theoretical particle physicist from Canada, says in “Underland,” deep in the bowels of the earth searching for dark matter from a SNOLAB research facility. She recalls how she used to pester her grandmother with countless questions as a child and after being dismissed with a nickname “Miss Why” then, she found a professional calling for her insatiable curiosity when her job entails staring into the abyss for answers, ever hopeful that even the slightest of clues will crop up – in her case, to explain more about the substance that has such an impact on the path of light among other influence it has on the universe.
In adapting Robert MacFarlane’s book about the largely unexplored territory beneath our feet, director Robert Petit succeeds in making Lisanti’s curiosity infectious as he follows her and two other subterranean investigators on quests that depict the nether regions with as much wonder as Richard Fleischer once imagined inner workings of the human body in “Fantastic Voyage.” While Lisanti is the only explicit scientist amongst the trio, the film tracks the equally rigorous work of archeologist Fatima Tec Pool in the Yucatan Peninsula as she looks for Mayan cave paintings for hints as to her personal history and Bradley Garrett, who thought he would be an archeologist himself before realizing that there was equally important ground to cover in his native U.S. and found underneath the Vegas strip as an urban explorer. The personal reasoning for their excursions proves crucial to framing the images they take in as if they are providing the light to viewers that they themselves need to inspect the dark, frequently stumbling across sights that may look ordinary without a proper context as much as Petit finds many that are extraordinary all on their own.
It isn’t only a clever tactic for transitions but a sly observation that this darkness connects the three explorations around the world when the film never needs to abruptly cut from one scene to the next and the separate yet interlocking pursuits all strive towards understanding fundamental truths that all seem to lie somewhere beyond reach. There is some mild buffering from Sandra Huller-narrated interstitials setting up the film’s chapters, pulled from MacFarlane’s text, but it is the words of Lisanti, Pool and Garrett that ultimately give shape to scenes of the Bucky Ball-esque dark mass detectors that Lisanti spends her time observing in deep water tanks and the geological history that Petit himself captures of surfaces ranging from rock walls to ice that show the passage of time. The film is at its best when drawing parallels that collapse any difference in perspectives when Lisanti and Pool may be on entirely different missions when one looks for particles and the other searches for traces of the past yet the impulse that guides them is exactly the same and as Pool sees art from her ancestors that illustrates what life once was, Garrett can draw similar conclusions from the graffiti he finds during his trips below. While “Underland” is designed as an immersive sensory experience, complete with ethereal cinematography and intricate sound design, to take you into worlds unknown, it is the places where it doesn’t seem so unfamiliar that end up becoming the most moving, showing how people leave their mark on history in all kinds of ways.
“Underland” does not yet have U.S. distribution.