The Deep House (2021)

directed by Alexandre Bustillo, Julien Maury

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.

Vivarium (2019)

directed by Lorcan Finnegan

Belgium, Denmark, Ireland

97 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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It took me a long time to watch this for reasons unknown. I think it was just too popular at the time and that intimidated me. There's a whole lot to unpack here, and I'm about to attempt to do that, but before anything else, I want to say: this movie is good. It's very good. I want to make sure I emphasize that it's an excellent movie aside from all of the metaphors and symbolism I believe it uses, and even if 100% of what it tries to convey goes over your head, I think anybody can still enjoy it just because of its overall quality.

The image of rows and rows of identical houses in a labyrinthine suburban neighborhood is not, by itself, necessarily indicative of any particular message, because it's used so frequently in media that it doesn't have to be attached to any societal commentary anymore. It can just be a motif used for aesthetics. It can come up in a child's drawings and in fact frequently does- the lines of houses made up of a block with a triangle for a roof, two windows, a little door; everybody knows how to draw that. But Vivarium does take a deeper look at this image of a perfectly spotless and identical suburbia, and it examines how insidious the idea of a "neighborhood" is at its heart. I think most things about this film were made to represent the unnatural cycle of life that capitalism tries to impress on young people- but not everything about it, which was crucial, and which I will get into later.

The film starts off with a young engaged couple wandering into a real estate company's office and eventually being shown around Yonder, a housing development made up of, as I just said, innumerable rows of the same house copied and pasted over and over to infinity. The sky is wrong; the clouds don't look real, and nothing about the scant bits of "nature" that exist in Yonder here and there is natural. In short, it's all obviously constructed as a prison of sorts. And it ends up being one- the couple immediately gets roped into staying in their assigned identical house, No. 9, and is almost as quickly presented with a human baby and the instruction "Raise the child and be released". 

(The child is probably the creepiest thing about this overall pretty creepy film. That boy just ain't right.)

One of a multitude of tiny details that makes everything about this movie's scenario that much more sinister is that the agent who shows the main characters the development emphasizes that it is good for a young couple. The very last thing Imogen Poots' character says before her and her fiancé get trapped in the neighborhood is that they don't have kids- not yet. These two facts, them being young people and not having had children yet, are why they're unacceptable to Yonder and, in a larger sense, to what society expects of us. It's not acceptable that by a certain time a couple should still be without a home and children, never mind personal desires or the economical instability that might lead them to that situation. "Not yet" is never a good enough explanation for not having children. A woman can't be allowed to have her own reasons for living her life at her own pace. The monitoring eyes of capitalism have to know if she can be used to reproduce more subjects.

Circling back around to the child they're given: The aspect of reproduction is what makes Vivarium such a nightmare to think about, insofar as any one singular thing can be described that way- the whole thing is just a horrible scenario to imagine yourself in. It's explicitly established that the only purpose of a mother is to produce identical, obedient subjects, who will then further ensnare other potential mothers into Yonder, who will then continue the cycle and produce more subjects in an endless loop. I am intentionally only mentioning the role of Poots' character as a mother because it seemed to me that her counterpart did not have too much of a part in any of this. I still wonder what Yonder really wanted with him- I guess he was kept around so that she would be slightly more complacent, but why allow him to dig the hole in the front yard and discover the whereabouts of their home's former inhabitants? But then that leads to the question of just... why do anything? Why any of this?

Things that seemed open-ended and made no sense were vital to the overall feel of the movie because, coming back to what I said at the beginning of this review about not every single thing being tied to a recognizable metaphor, it's better that a large portion of this is just totally absurd and random. It makes for a better viewing experience and more stuff to chew on. I know that I've used this as an example for how not to make a "dystopian" film before, but I think back yet again to that movie where straight people are ostracized and gay people are the norm. Simply flipping a stereotype on its head does not good science fiction make. Pointing a finger at a thinly veiled caricature of society doesn't do it for me either. A contextless child's drawing of rows of square-and-triangle houses means nothing without a narrative behind it. But something like Vivarium that is not straightforward, that has all of these bizarre and unsettling elements to it- like the fact that the boy seems to be in contact with some thing, some indescribable entity that may or may not be running the show- something like this is an interesting, unique dystopia. It merges recognizable commentary on society with the truly weird. Imogen Poots really does carry the film, even though kind of the whole point is that no space is given for her or her fiancé to be individuals. Her performance, especially at the end when the relentlessness of the neighborhood's assault on her leaves her just broken and helpless, is what makes this movie as good as it is. And again: it is very, very good. Director Lorcan Finnegan is establishing quite a track record.