Scurry into the Meaningless Darkness
Scurry follows two strangers who descend into the forgotten arteries beneath a ruined city. Above, a disaster spreads via insectoid monsters. Or perhaps it’s only the chaos of civilization itself. Below ground the air grows thin, their light dies, and the noise of the world falls away. What remains is the raw confrontation with absurdity.
Director Luke Sparke crafts a space where reason dissolves. His tunnels are not only literal but moral. There is no good or evil here, just survival and decay. The film is framed almost in real time, its camera crawling behind its characters like a conscience unwilling to intervene. The result is a claustrophobic symphony of dust, panting, and futile light.
Classic Horror Tropes
Scurry builds from the bones of classic horror, the subterranean trap, the unseen predator, the false hope of escape. These are not clichés so much as rituals. In each trope, one senses not invention but inevitability. As though the film accepts that horror itself is a repetition, an inevitable cycle we cannot break.
The Camusian Abyss
There is a moment in Scurry when one character mutters, “We’ll die down here.” The other replies, “We already have.”
This line, unremarkable in any other script, becomes Scurry’s entire thesis. Like Meursault in The Stranger, the characters find no moral structure, only the naked confrontation with extinction. The tunnels are the absurd rendered physical, endless, cold, and indifferent.
Sparke’s lens lingers on faces half-lit, eyes glistening not with hope but recognition. That fear, stripped of meaning, becomes acceptance, defeat. There is no heroism in this place, no redemption. Only movement, crawling, climbing, gasping. The last twitches of a body that has lost connection to it’s lifeforce. Muscle spasms from a body refusing to stop even when the mind has died.
Fear Without Consolation
Scurry is not a film about monsters. It is a film about futility. The one-take aesthetic enhances this realism. There are no merciful cuts, only duration. Like Camus’ plague-ridden Oran, the horror is unrelenting precisely because it is ordinary. Its tunnels are the corridors of human consciousness, narrow, echoing, without end. The creatures, when finally revealed, are not supernatural judgments. They are part of the earth, part of us. It draws power from the classic tropes of horror, but empties them of their original comfort.
In this void, Scurry becomes something rare. There is no moral lesson, no divine punishment, and no survival to justify the suffering. A horror movie that understands that the greatest terror is not death, but living on when there is nothing to live for.
