Summary
“In Vaulted Halls Entombed” is a deliberately ambiguous visual treat.
This recap of Love, Death + Robots season 3, episode 8, “In Vaulted Halls Entombed”, contains spoilers. You can check out all of our coverage on this show by clicking these words.
For a moment upon starting “In Vaulted Halls Entombed”, I thought it was live-action. That’s a testament to the quality of the CGI here, which marries almost photorealism with otherworldly monstrosities and builds to a deliberately ambiguous conclusion that raises more questions than it answers.
Love, Death + Robots season 3, episode 8 recap
The idea is modern warfare brushing up against ancient evil as a Special Forces team on the hunt for hostages – this is a far cry from the depiction of S.F. in “Kill Team Kill” – venture into a dark cave full of exotic beasties. Lighting in this episode is especially good, with the green-tinged night vision providing a touch of terror, and the various perils and casualties of the cave only exacerbating the effect.
Characterization is thin, obviously, but also beside the point. This episode is a visual treat more than anything, but it trades thematic depth for outright mystery, presenting us with something we can’t explain and then leaving us to contemplate it. There’s no right answer for why some ancient telepathic behemoth would gouge out the eyes of the surviving soldier and send her wandering the desert while muttering to herself in an unintelligible alien language, and why should there be? It’s more fun to speculate.
With a plot setup that feels cribbed pretty obviously from House of Ashes, a cinematic horror video game in Supermassive Games’ Dark Pictures Anthology, and visuals that are similarly gamey in their presentation, “In Vaulted Halls Entombed” feels very much like a couple of action and suspense sequences that ask you to fill in the context for yourself.
