The initial descent is all looming shadows and the eerie silhouettes of rusted ironwork from the Cold War, but the trouble starts once an accident sees one of the group badly injured and unable to get back to the surface. The four barely know each other, let alone their guide, but the lure of the old ruins proves too tempting. The plot jumps almost straight into the action, with Lucia, Denis, Marie and Juna signing up with veteran urbexer Kris, who promises them he can sneak them through Berlin's tunnel network to an ancient SS bunker sealed since the second world war. There's an ugly, cynical streak to Urban Explorer that's not so much misanthropic as downright lazy, with great swathes of story seemingly missing, character development sidelined in favour of drawing out their suffering and a downbeat tone that's less nihilism and more a giggling child pulling the wings off a fly. It's not merely the production-line approach of modern-day stalk and slash productions like something bankrolled by Platinum Dunes. Fetscher's film is technically sound, and when the gore starts in earnest it's skilfully done but the director does practically nothing to dispel the idea we're just marking time until these kids start begging for their lives. Four young people go creeping through the tunnels under Berlin, only someone's waiting down there who's a little too happy to see them. Do you like watching stupid people die? Not the cheeriest introduction, maybe, but it's hard to see what else anyone could get out of Andy Fetscher's Urban Explorer.
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