Belgium, France
82 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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The concept of exploring a house, or in some cases a whole town, that has been flooded either by natural or manmade causes is one of the smallest identifiable niches in horror that I can still point to and call out as a defined Thing™. It's not always horror that utilizes that idea, but it very frequently is because of the inherent eerieness of such a scenario. And it's something that I love. It's hard to do it wrong, but The Deep House definitely does it right.
While the characters come second to the setting, I was expecting the main couple in this film to be much more insufferable due to the synopsis promising me (fictional) "YouTubers" for main characters. But I was surprised at a scene early on in the film where the boyfriend pulls out his camera and begins narrating to his audience while his girlfriend goes to ask directions. Surprised, because instead of saying corny and typical YouTuber stuff like "Uhhhh what's up guys here I am in this SCARY abandoned village, ooooh I think I heard a noise, aaahh I'm so scared", he gives insightful comments in a respectful manner. I was expecting this to be one of those movies where you're encouraged to hate the main characters, but these people are no worse, and certainly a great deal better, than your average adventure-loving horror protagonists. Again, though, their character is not that important - it's just refreshing to see two people who aren't bumbling idiots, although they may be a bit naïve.
What is important about this movie is the location. Relatively little of it takes place on dry land, and the above-water action is modestly beautiful - not over-the-top, but a lovely display of semi-rural French greenery that makes one pine for a vacation. Once they enter the water, that's where the movie stays for the rest of its running time. Some suspension of disbelief is required to smooth out some of the details, such as how anybody is audible to each other underwater or how they can possibly be playing music, but as long as you're a scrub like me who doesn't know the first thing about scuba diving other than it gets you wet, you probably won't get your immersion (sorry) broken. It is interesting that the actors' faces are, out of necessity, covered almost entirely by masks throughout their entire time underwater, because being able to see reactions and expressions is half of what makes a movie, especially a horror movie. Instead we have to rely on their voiceovers, which, again, are only clearly audible for the viewers' benefit and would probably not be that easy to hear in reality. The film also doesn't make use of the oxygen limit as a gimmick, which I appreciated; the situation was tense enough without being reminded of how much or little time the characters had left every two minutes.
I genuinely don't know how they filmed most of this. I doubt the whole thing was filmed on an underwater set, but no matter which way I looked at it, this had to be a tremendously difficult and uncomfortable shoot. I assume some scenes were shot on dry land with a filter applied to them, and occasionally when an object is floating, its movements don't look quite like they would if it were really drifting through water, but the amount of shots that couldn't have been done any other way than by actually filming underwater seemed to outweigh the stuff that could have been accomplished with trickery. This movie feels completely realistic, to the point where it almost overshadows the horror aspect of it. You could watch this even as a non-horror fan just for the novelty of basically watching a very dark and ominous exploration of what feels like a real underwater ruin. There is something so universally fascinating about the idea of swimming through a house - I used to have dreams like that as a kid, and I don't think I'm the only one. When the couple enters the grounds of the underwater house and they float over the locked front gates instead of walking through them, I had flashbacks to those surreal dreams.
There's something perfectly horrible about that house. Like I said, this concept doesn't have to be horror, but it lends itself well to it, and with the way Bustillo & Maury flesh out their plot with other stuff that makes the house more perilous than simply a drowned wreck, The Deep House uses every angle of its setting for the scare factor. I don't want to spoil too much of this because I know it's barely even technically out yet and a lot of people haven't seen it, but I enjoyed that the plot was sparse and that the setting was allowed to take center stage, as it should. The end introduces some backstory, but doesn't fall all over itself trying to throw in more padding for a plot that did not have to be groundbreaking.
I mostly know Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury as makers of extremely violent movies. The Deep House is practically PG-13 compared to what they've done before, and while saying that that's "refreshing" implies that their gore is tiresome or that they're not good at it (which isn't true), I don't know how else to describe this. It is refreshing. The scenery is gorgeous, like I said, and not only is the concept interesting but the way it's executed is unique too, and so in comparison with a splattery slasher - even the best splattery slasher - this feels like a breath of fresh air. There is some violence in this, mostly towards the end, and it maintains an atmosphere of foreboding throughout that can get genuinely creepy, but I guess you can't render gouts of blood and guts underwater as well as you could on land. Some movies come out at just the right time - a beautiful, sunny shot-on-location horror movie with a good balance of aesthetics and ideas just as we all prepare to hunker down for another pandemic winter.
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