Juno Is Not A Villain, But She IS The Best Character In ‘The Descent’

The Descent (2005) is an all-time classic horror film. On a surface level, the brutal action, iconic monsters, and intensely claustrophobic situations make The Descent an exhilarating experience. But if you look a little deeper, one of the main reasons why the movie works so well is because of its complex characters. Juno is perhaps the most complex and compelling of them all.

If you haven’t seen The Descent, you should watch it before reading this article since there will be lots of MAJOR SPOILERS. But, to summarize, The Descent is about six friends who go on a spelunking trip into an uncharted cave system. They become trapped, and as they look for a way out they encounter a group of blind humanoid monsters—referred to as crawlers—who violently attack the women who have stumbled into their territory.

Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) is the main character. Her husband and daughter were killed in a car accident one year prior, and the trip, planned by her friend Juno (Natalie Mendoza), is meant to be a bonding experience. Mistakes are made, secrets are withheld, and the trip ends with Sarah stabbing Juno in the leg and leaving her to be killed by crawlers.

Many viewers see this climactic moment between Sarah and Juno as one of justified revenge. But The Descent is not a revenge movie. It is a movie about one woman’s mental descent into becoming something like a monster. That woman, however, is not Juno. Juno is misunderstood and maligned by the characters in the movie, and by many viewers. But before I get to why Juno is the best and most interesting character in The Descent, here’s what she obviously did wrong.

Juno Lied About The Cave

The great thing about The Descent is that every character has flaws. Humans are flawed, and the writing in The Descent makes its flawed characters feel like real people. Humans can make poor decisions based on good intentions. That doesn’t necessarily make them a bad person though.

So, when Juno decided to lie and take her friends into an uncharted cave system rather than the safe cave they were supposed to explore, she made a reckless and dangerous decision. This is the worst thing she did in the entire movie, no question.

Juno says her intentions were to surprise everyone at the end of the trip, bringing them together as a group when they realize they’d just explored the unexplored. There’s no reason why anyone should disbelieve her intentions. When her initial lie about the cave is revealed, Juno appears to be genuinely remorseful and honest in response. Still, there’s no excuse for such a dangerous lie. But is the proper punishment for that lie to be left behind to die at the hands (and teeth) of crawlers? No, it isn’t.

What Was Juno’s Relationship With Paul?

Another thing Juno-haters will point to as something she did wrong is her relationship with Sarah’s husband Paul. We know Juno and Paul had some sort of relationship because of three things: the tender way they act around each other in the opening scene, Juno telling Sarah’s best friend Beth “we all lost something in that crash” in reference to Paul’s death, and the necklace Juno wears that has Paul’s favorite saying, “love each day,” engraved on it. But what do we really know about their relationship?

Were Juno and Paul sleeping together? That’s what most viewers seem to assume, but we don’t know that. Maybe their relationship was purely emotional with nothing physical taking place. Maybe Paul had fallen out of love with Sarah and was working up the nerve to tell her he’d fallen for Juno (because he was acting strangely in the car before the crash). As viewers, we don’t know any of this, because Juno never talks about it. Importantly, the characters in the movie don’t know the extent of Juno and Paul’s relationship either. They, like so many viewers, just assume the worst.

Should Juno have told Sarah about her feelings for Paul? That’s debatable. Before his death, that talk should have come from Paul. After his death, what would be accomplished by Juno telling Sarah about their relationship? It would just upset Sarah even more, and it would tarnish her memory of Paul. Frankly, Juno telling Sarah after Paul’s death would just be shifting the burden of that knowledge from Juno to Sarah. Instead, Juno stays silent and puts her friend’s feelings before her own.

Juno Risks Her Life For Her Friends

Okay, I’ve pointed out some of Juno’s mistakes and why they’re blown out of proportion by the characters in the movie as well as viewers. But here’s where I start to reveal why Juno is actually better than every other character in The Descent. The most important reason is this: Juno risks her life for her friends when everyone else acts selfishly.

When the crawlers first attack, one of them jumps onto Holly and mortally wounds her. Every other person scatters (with Sarah conspicuously sprinting away on her own and even leaving Beth behind), but Juno is the one person who stays behind to defend Holly. Not even knowing what this monster is or how dangerous it might be, Juno fights for her friend. Holly is taken away when a second crawler appears, but the point is that Juno is the only person willing to risk her life against the crawlers for the lives of her friends.

This fact holds true throughout the rest of the movie. After killing a crawler (and accidentally stabbing Beth, but more on that later), Juno starts calling out for the rest of her friends. Sarah ignores Juno’s calls, focusing solely on herself. Rebecca and Sam also ignore Juno, apparently content with the idea that if Juno gets swarmed, then at least they’ll be safe.

But Juno never stops trying to save everyone. She defends Rebecca from a crawler, again at the risk of her own safety. She also refuses to try to leave the caves without finding Sarah first, despite others who are seemingly okay with leaving Sarah behind. Sure, Juno is the reason they’re in this specific cave, but she’s not the reason for the cave-in, and she’s not the reason for the crawlers. However, when confronted with her mistakes, Juno puts everyone else’s life before her own. The same can’t be said for most of her friends.

Only One Character Tried To Kill Her Friend

A pivotal moment in The Descent is when Juno mistakenly stabs Beth in the neck with a pickaxe. This happens after Juno fought two crawlers while defending Holly, and Beth weirdly sneaks up behind Juno. The stabbing is unfortunate, but it’s not Juno’s fault. She’d already been jumped from behind by a crawler and was clearly on edge, so Beth approaching silently from behind her was a terribly dangerous decision on her part.

Juno does, however, back away and leave Beth alone while she’s still alive. It’s obvious that Beth is dying and there is no way to save her. It’s also obvious that Juno is in a state of shock. Seeing what she’d done to Beth, even if accidental, caused her to freeze-up and then leave. A sad decision for sure, but an understandable one given the circumstances. It’s moments like this that make the character of Juno feel human, flaws and all.

So, Juno never intentionally tries to kill anyone. But you know who does? Sarah. By this point, Sarah has gone through her own journey. Her already fragile state of mind has been broken down even further as she defends herself in the crawlers’ nest where she kills a child crawler and its presumed mother (an obvious metaphor for her own life). Sarah, emerging from a pool of blood, is now as much monster as she is human. But her descent is not yet complete.

Moments earlier, Sarah found Beth on the verge of death. Beth tells Sarah not to trust Juno, and Sarah finds Juno’s “love each day” necklace in Beth’s hand. Sarah comes to her own conclusions, later asks Juno a few leading questions merely meant to justify her own assumptions about what happened, and then the two of them confront a roomful of crawlers. Then Sarah stabs Juno in the leg and leaves her for dead as crawlers approach. This is the only act by any human character in the movie where they intended for their friend to die (Sarah also mercy-killed Beth, but that’s different).

The sad thing is, Juno probably would have sacrificed herself for Sarah if given the chance. Juno repeatedly showed her willingness to risk her life for her friends. She also repeatedly declared her intention to save Sarah and get out of the caves alive, together. But Sarah kept her own secrets, and she made her own assumptions without ever wanting to actually listen to Juno’s side of the story. Yes, Sarah was suffering from a traumatic incident, but so was Juno.

I love The Descent and have written about it before on Creepy Catalog. Check it out some of my thoughts on the overall movie here, and take a look at which of its two different endings I prefer here.