Since early May, surveillance cameras around New York have recorded several instances of unidentified individuals entering and exiting the sewer system in the middle of the night. On Tuesday, a city spokesperson warned of the hazards of such unauthorized spelunking, noting that it is “illegal and extremely dangerous.” (Also: ew). In its coverage, The Associated Press got into the suitably what-a-weird-world spirit of these nocturnal incursions and asked if the enigmatic explorers were “Mole people? Crocodile catchers? Mario brothers?”
After reading that, I promptly emailed the publicist for “Underland” — a documentary about some very different subterranean adventurers — and asked if those murky outings were a publicity stunt for the movie. They weren’t, though clearly something is in the air other than sewer gas, as this nonfiction feature makes engagingly clear. All over the world, an array of voyagers are descending, legally and not, into the lower depths. In spooky tunnels, labyrinthine caves and futuristic-looking laboratories, people are wandering through, and even working in, a world that serves as a strange twin to the one aboveground.
Based on Robert Macfarlane’s 2019 nonfiction best seller “Underland: A Deep Time Journey,” the documentary offers a fascinating, if frustratingly abbreviated look into that world. It’s a journey that in the movie — written by Macfarlane and its director, Robert Petit — has separate portals into complicating, at times beguiling mysteries. The most beautiful and inviting is in Yucatán, Mexico, where the long roots of a massive tree hang over the edge of a sinkhole, called a cenote, like thick tendrils of hair. It’s there, shortly after the movie opens, that the Mexican archaeologist Fátima Tec Pool lowers herself down on a rope that will guide her into the past amid shafts of light and the ebb and flow of birdsong and water.
As Tec Pool explains in voice-over, she grew up in the area and has long been fascinated by its caves. She’s hardly alone. The ancient Mayans believed that these caverns were passages to the underworld — “They called it Xibalba,” she says — and performed rituals inside them. Along with a small group of researchers, Tec Pool is looking for evidence of Mayan activities, not knowing what to expect. With headlamps and packs stuffed with gear, she and her team march into the void to begin mapping this long, snaking and often enchantingly exotic cave, sometimes on foot, at other times inching forward while on their bellies in narrow passages.
It’s hard work, perfumed with a sense of old-fashioned adventure, and both it and Tec Pool immediately pull you in. It’s frustrating then that the filmmakers don’t simply stick with her. Instead, they incorporate some strainingly poetic interludes (narrated by the German actress Sandra Hüller) and restlessly cut between Tec Pool’s team and the movie’s other guides, both Americans: the theoretical particle physicist Mariangela Lisanti, who’s a professor of physics at Princeton University; and the urban explorer and author Bradley Garrett, who lives in California. Garrett enters the picture at night behind the wheel someplace near Las Vegas where, ignoring a no-trespassing sign, he enters what looks like a derelict lot, pries off a metal plate with a crowbar and climbs into a most unwelcome-looking storm drain.
Garrett has much to say, but there’s more to him than this documentary can begin to suggest, as his appearances on “60 Minutes” and elsewhere suggest. For her part, Lisanti studies dark matter and here takes an elevator two kilometers down, down, down to work in a laboratory in Ontario, Canada, that could double as the set of a science-fiction thriller. The section on her is pretty far out, but it raises more questions than it answers; and both Lisanti — whose childhood nickname was “Miss Why” — and her work remains disappointingly underexplored. Like Tec Pool and Garret, Lisanti merits far more time than this 79-minute documentary affords her. (Macfarlane’s book runs nearly 500 pages.) This is that rare movie that could do with a longer running time, which would, perhaps, give it greater depth.
Underland Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 19 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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