Where would modern horror be without desperate young people willing to do ridiculous things all in the name of compiling YouTube content? In these strange, clickbait times in which we live in, the foolhardy Podcaster, YouTuber or (shudder) TikToker have become as a reliable reason to inspire idiots to wander into the vague direction of certain death as 80s campers exploring a strange noise or dopey teens daring one another to fuck with the supernatural. It takes a minimum of set up, it’s stunningly feasible (just go online and look) and yet it still allows you to have a superiority complex as you loudly denounce them as morons as they shuffle toward another, obviously lethal, endeavor.
As a result, I would imagine that The Deep House probably strikes a tangible “nope” nerve as it’s submerged haunted house premise attempts to merge The Blair Witch Project with 47 Meters Down, but can even the lure of going viral justify taking even these risks?
Passionate YouTube contributors Ben and Tina are a young, engaged couple who live-record their experiences as they visit various haunted houses and hope for that illusive million hits. There latest excursion sees them in Tina’s native France, hoping to scope out an old sanitorium that has been swallowed up by an artificial lake, however they immediately have to engage the breaks on this idea when it turns out that the place has become a major attraction with more underwater traffic than the Krusty Krab.
However, a chance meeting with a local named Pierre steers them onto an alternative venture as he knows of a mansion in a much more isolated part of the lake that remains perfectly preserved despite being underwater since 1984.
Once arriving, Ben and Tina waste no time climbing into their diving gear and prepping their swanky tech for the dive and not long after hitting the water, they see what they are looking for, looming up at them out of the briney gloom. At first, it’s business as usual as aside from the odd red herring involving fish swimming suddenly put of nowhere and Ben pulling the old teasing boyfriend shit, their exploration of the watery abode goes without a hitch as the pair manage to get some incredibly spooky footage – but things start to get extra weird once they manage to force their way into the basement.
You’d think that the door being blocked by a life sized statue of a crucified Jesus would be warning enough, but when the pair find perfectly preserved bodies chained up with torture equipment, they finally realise that they’ve fucked up on a scale thus unheard of. After finding that their only way in has suddenly become a bricked up wall, Ben and Tina have to combat horrific visions, waterlogged ghosts and their own dwindling oxygen supply if they’re ever going to reach the surface ever again.
Essentially a feature length version of that haunting scene from Dario Argento’s Inferno where Irene Miracle enters a submerged room to grab a piece of wayward jewelry, The Deep House certainly has a premice you don’t hear of everyday. I mean, obviously there’s more haunted house movies than there are flies in the Amityville house, but none of them require the foolhardy people who visit them to don flippers and oxygen tanks and in this respect, Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s movie is wonderfully unique. In fact, when you consider that the directing teams previous works include the stunning Inside and the underseen Livid, the potential for supernatural terrors to collide with a very real fear of drowning sounds like a match made in horror heaven.
From a visual standpoint, The Deep House delivers on its potential magnificently, mostly avoiding any Blair Witch style flailing cameras in favour of boucing back and forth between panicked POV shots and smooth, third person cinematography that allows you to drink in all the scrumptious, eerie details that the movie contains. Simply put, underwater houses are fricking scary – end of – and Bustillo and Maury go out of their way to get every dreamy, billowing curtain and unnerving shot they can even before the supernatural stuff starts, riffing on watery versions of horror tropes.
However, when the ghostly stuff happens, things start floating a little off course and all the negatives you get from filming the majority of your movie entirely submerged start to outweigh the positives. One, it’s really fucking hard to tell a story underwater, especially a horror one, mainly because the faces of our leads are partially covered by their diving masks for the entirety of the scary stuff which proves to be a major problem as one of the best ways to translate fear on film is – you guessed it – to focus on the face. Also, while it turns out that the house has a predictably traumatic past, the fact that the information has to be processed by someone wearing a ton of diving equipment means a huge amount of impact is lost as most of the realisation has to be clumsily projected via voice alone.
Maybe this wouldn’t be so much of an issue if our main characters were the type of people you could hardly stand to see on a property buying programme let alone an intense horror film and their impressive unlikability proves to be disastrous. Camille Rowe’s Tina immediately becomes hysterical the second anything even remotely odd happens and you can’t help but wonder how someone who visits haunted houses for a living can be so easy to reduce to a quivering wreck. Alternatively, James Jagger’s excruciatingly annoying Ben employs such bland line readings, he doesn’t sound remotely scared at all, even when the bodies in the basement suddenly come alive. At least in most movies where an unlikable protagonist is stuck in a precarious predicament, you can still generate empathy by having them look or sound like they’re terrified beyond all reason, but due to a mixture of Jagger’s lifeless performance and the fact that his character is a teasing dickhole of a boyfriend, it undoes a lot if hard work that the genuinely impressive visuals put in.
Genuinely worth a watch if only for the spectacular logistics that give the movie its distinctive look – however, punchable protagonists and the two-sided blade that comes from extensively filming in murky H²O mean that The Deep House leaks when it should flow.
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