The Superdeep (2020)

directed by Arseny Syukhin

Russia

113 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I was awaiting this very eagerly, because the Kola Superdeep Borehole is one of my favorite weird little things about the world, and a horror movie about it, although it necessitates a lot of exaggeration and just plain making stuff up, seems like a logical choice. Pretty much everything about this movie is fabricated, though, which, looking back on it now, I really should have anticipated. The actual borehole is literally just a very narrow and extremely long hole going seven-plus miles into the Earth; there's nothing that even comes close to the research station located deep underground that The Superdeep takes place in. This isn't me complaining- it would be very hard to make an actually scary movie about the real-world borehole, which looks boring in comparison to The Superdeep. I just want to make sure everybody knows that while the idea at the core of this film is true, nothing else about it is.

I had my excitement dampened a few days before seeing this because some headlines started to come out that hinted at it not being very good, but I plowed ahead because I gotta have my movie about a giant hole in the ground. The issue that a lot of reviewers seem to take with The Superdeep is that it tries to do too much: it blends together too many disparate horror tropes and doesn't stick with any single one for the entire running time. You can see clear influences from a ton of other movies here, most notably The Thing and Alien as well as, probably, some Russian films I'm not even aware of. I see where people are coming from in getting frustrated at the way this movie bounced around, but it didn't bother me that much.

What did bother me a little bit was that, despite having all these influences and ideas and dealing with seemingly every horror concept at once, it deals with them all with the exact same tone. This is one of those horror movies that seems to treat itself more as an action movie. It doesn't really leave room for genuine tension in the sense of letting you get to a point where you're on the edge of your seat, instead it seeks to make you feel upset by putting the characters in survival situations that are dangerous and unpleasant. Other movies are the horror of waking up in the middle of the night and seeing a weird shadow in your room, this movie is the horror of your buddy telling you about the time his boiler exploded and singed his eyebrows off. Again, I'm not complaining- horror comes in many shades, and some of those shades are tinged with the influence of the action genre. The Superdeep certainly doesn't do its thing badly, it's just not how I like to watch a horror movie. The protagonist and basically everyone else in this film repeatedly gets into situations that should kill them in an instant, so you have to suspend your disbelief pretty hard at all times here, which is also why I mentioned at the beginning that this story is almost entirely fictionalized. If you're not going into this (like I did) thinking it's going to be really about the actual borehole, it's easier to get into the mindset of being told a story.

The saving grace of this all, and unfortunately the one thing I can't get too deep into without spoiling it, is the practical effects, especially towards the end. I was mulling over whether a movie that was otherwise fairly average could truly be elevated to greatness by superior practical effects, and I think the answer, in this case, is that it can. Without the effects or with cheap CGI, The Superdeep would feel pretty soulless. But because it wears those horror influences on its sleeve and uses some absolutely gorgeous practical effects, it made me latch onto it more. It made me able to recognize what I was seeing and its place in a longer horror tradition and that garnered some affection from me where otherwise I wouldn't have felt anything. The concept of the monsters in this movie isn't anything I haven't seen before, but I've never seen it done this well. The scene where the main character is trying to escape this lurching mass of horribleness that's making deeply disturbing sounds felt genuinely iconic. And I did love the scene where she had to go outside the station into the bowels of the Earth, it might have been a bit overwrought but the sense of scale and foreboding was pulled off nicely.

Milena Radulović carries the film really well despite a general lack of character backstory for her. I couldn't help comparing this movie to another recent Russian horror, Sputnik, because both films have a scientifically-minded woman MC who doesn't show a lot of emotion. That lead to me realizing that this movie excelled in practically every way Sputnik failed, particularly in the effects department. The Superdeep is not without its faults, but it's a good time with some specific scenes that knocked it out of the park, and I'm glad it's made it onto Shudder for everyone to enjoy.