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AS ABOVE, SO BELOW

"Pagan Philosophy Should Stay in the Past"

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What You Need To Know:

AS ABOVE, SO BELOW is a thriller that starts off exciting, but gets lost and confused trying to be compelling. Following the current fad of telling a story as if it’s a documentary, the movie focuses on Scarlett, a young urban archeologist. Following her dead father’s footsteps, Scarlett’s trying to retrieve an ancient stone with incredible powers. A clue leads Scarlett to enlist the help of some friends and strangers to search the catacombs beneath Paris to find the ancient stone. Deep underground, the explorers start to become haunted by familiar nightmares and are trapped. The only way out is to go deeper.

The premise of AS ABOVE, SO BELOW stems from a New Age, pagan worldview. The deeper the movie tries explaining its pagan mythology, the less interesting it actually becomes. Worst of all is the utterly hopeless worldview the movie presents. AS ABOVE, SO BELOW explores the causation of belief and the “oneness” of everything. Ultimately, the horrifying images and foul language in AS ABOVE, SO BELOW make it an excessive, unacceptable movie with little to no redemptive value.

Content:

(PaPaPa, FRFRFR, OO, C, B, LLL, VVV, M) Very strong New Age, pagan worldview stemming from a false philosophy of the physical and metaphysical, with many occult symbols, but some crosses are shown in a church and a reference to a Bible passage; at least 60 obscenities (including many “f” words) and 14 profanities (frequent uses of “GD” and “JC”); very strong violence includes multiple images of men hanging from nooses, injuries from collapsing tunnels resulting in bloodied arm, a deranged man smashes a woman's skull into the ground, a man falls to his death, image of a young boy drowning and another boy on fire, multiple corpses, and a myriad of other horrifying images; no sexual content, but man mentions a woman's legs, plus one kiss; no explicit nudity but some French dancers are very briefly seen at a dance club in revealing outfits; no alcohol; no smoking or drugs; and, a group breaks into a church, but not with malicious intent.

More Detail:

AS ABOVE, SO BELOW is a thriller that starts off exciting, but gets lost and confused in its attempt to be compelling.

Following the current fad of telling ones story as if it’s a documentary, the movie begins with Scarlett, a student of urban archeology. Following her dead father’s footsteps, Scarlett’s trying to retrieve an ancient stone with incredible powers. She finds a critical clue in Iran to unlocking the stone’s location in Paris. There, she enlists an old friend, George, to help her translate the Aramaic transcriptions she found in Iran.

Scarlett, George and Benji (who’s filming Scarlett for a project) discover that the stone is 600 some feet below Paris in a secret chamber. The only way to get to this secret chamber is through the catacombs lying beneath Paris.

To maneuver through the vast catacombs, Scarlett gets three French natives who know how to navigate the tombs to help them reach their destination. George at first refuses to go underground because he’s still haunted by the fact that his younger brother drowned in a cave when he was a boy. However, circumstances force him to join the others. As they explore deeper parts of the catacombs, tensions and fears rise as weird occurrences begin to follow them. Personal demons in each one of the explorers manifest themselves impossibly in physical forms. To make things worse, their entrance has become blocked. So, the only way for escape is to go deeper into the caves where their nightmares are out to kill them.

The premise of AS ABOVE, SO BELOW stems from a New Age, pagan maxim contending that “whatever happens on any level of reality (physical, emotional or mental) also happens on every other level.” Though translated and interpreted in various ways, this belief is used in the movie to trap each of the characters in their own psyche to battle with their own failures or regrets. The deeper the movie goes into explaining this pagan mythology, the less interesting it actually becomes, ultimately ending up quite anti-climatically. That said, the driven characters are interesting, and the documentary style filmmaking is actually more effective here than many other such horror movies. Still, the movie sets up possible villains that are never explored and ultimately leaves the viewer wanting, not more, just something else.

Worst of all is the utterly hopeless worldview the movie presents. Destroying the Creator-creature distinction that’s critical to Christian doctrine, AS ABOVE, SO BELOW explores the causation of belief and the “oneness” of everything. Along the way, viewers have to endure many horrifying images and a slew of vulgar and profane language. Ultimately, AS ABOVE, SO BELOW is an excessive, unacceptable movie with little to no redemptive value.