Halloween challenge 2023 Day 1
So my selection for this October’s watch list got off to a shaky start with 2021’s The Deep House. (It’s easy to get burnt out quickly when several of the pics turn out to be so-so)
The premise is what drew me in: A horror film set in a long submerged French village. But sadly, despite being impressive technically and visually, the whole thing just doesn’t quite come off.
Beautiful and intriguing French girl Tina (Camille Rowe) is inexplicably dating lughead Brit Ben, (James Jagger) while working on an abandoned places YouTube channel together.
Ben does things like film Tina taking a piss at the side of the road against her wishes, mocks her fear of snakes, and is about as charismatic as a dictionary. Despite the above Tina is so desperate to get engaged that she lets him pressure her into diving to the bottom of a remote French lake for video views.
Once inside a submerged villa it becomes a classic ‘haunted house with Satanic undertones’ movie but with the added interest of everyone having to swim everywhere.
I did genuinely appreciate the effort that went in to the impressive underwater set design as well as the top quality cinematography from Jacques Ballard. (The whole thing is really shot underwater with little CG) Unfortunately, it’s the script that lets this one down.
Tina is an interesting character but she is hampered by being either hysterical or consistently doing the opposite of whatever her gut tells her. I was also quite irritated by an unnecessary nipple shot quite early on.
Ben’s dialog is robotic. I did question if it was an intentional B movie leaning but I don’t think so. He is extremely unlikable and completely under reacts to everything Tina overreacts to. I’m starting to see a trend with idiot male Brits abroad now after watching Italy’s A Classic Horror Story (2021, De Feo/Strippoli) last October.
There is a moment at the end (without giving away spoilers) where we almost reach a nice catharsis only to have it snatched away and for everything to be left unresolved. Sometimes that kind of ending can be really creepy but generally it gets overdone and the audience is just left wondering what was the point and meaning behind everything we’ve just seen. Watch out for an end credit sequence too.
I was a bit surprised to see that this was directed by Alaxandre Bustillo and Julien Maury as I really loved their earlier work, Livid (2011) which had an amazing creepy atmosphere. Deep House has a creep factor but there is never a moment where this translated into genuine fear for me. It just mostly left me with a sinking feeling. There seems to have been a reliance on the novelty of the underwater aspect and clearly a lot of the time and budget went in that direction, perhaps at the expense of other things.
The Deep House is worth a watch but it’s not up there with the classics I’m afraid.
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