The Deep House

Water Palava!

The Deep House
France/Belgium 2020
Directed by Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury
Radar Films

Okay, so the newish movie The Deep House, is a curious and perhaps, somewhat refreshing use of the found footage trope in horror movies in that, it doesn’t stay found footage all the way through. This is not to say it’s like REC 3 (reviewed here) in that it starts off as found footage and then quickly abandons the concept. I mean, yes, it does start off as found footage here for one of the pre-credits sequences but it blends things with standard, third person POV shooting and also, doesn’t try to justify the use of the footage as a story beat either. The footage from the two cameras of the two main characters, plus their underwater camera drone Tom (after Peeping Tom) is just another viewpoint to enrich the process... giving the surprise and scares associated with found footage horror but without having to needlessly tie it down either.

The story starts off with a couple of set ups before the opening credits even hit. The first is to establish the two main protagonists, a girlfriend/boyfriend team played by Camille Rowe and James Jagger (son of Mick) as a team of vloggers who take their cameras around allegedly haunted buildings and edit their footage into vlogs for views on the internet. I am going to refer to these two by their real life names because, according to the IMDB, Camille’s character is nameless* (I certainly didn’t catch it when I was watching) so, when I talk about the actor here, I can also be talking about the character... okay?

The opening is pretty standard ‘Most Haunted’ style stuff, as the two are walking around a place in Ukraine, with Camille gets freaked out by James’ antics, while capturing the atmosphere. This is to set up that James often fools around to scare her, so we can understand her reactions later when the main action starts. We then come out of the first person POV for a bit to show Camille practicing holding her breath in a bathtub. When James comes to pick her up, we find that she can hold her breath for a maximum of three minutes. So, again, even by this early stage the audience knows that they wouldn’t have gotten this information unless there’s a scene later on when the poor woman is left without her scuba mask and is trying to escape a watery death... so, it’s a shame the movie telegraphs itself so much but, yeah... there’s that.

After that, we get the credits sequence as these globe hopping vloggers go to France to shoot a show in some underwater ruins, only to be disappointed when it turns out it’s a popular tourist spot. However, a local guy played by Eric Savin offers to take them to a very rare, underwater folly. A genuine house under water in a lake in a forest. So it’s no time before our two intrepid hit-hunters are taking a deep dive with their two video cameras plus their third camera, the Tom drone, to see what’s down there. Which turns out to be a perfectly preserved house with a lot of old school horror movie surprises and a not so easy way of getting back out and up. Shenanigans ensue as the two are pursued by the things that inhabit the house, while the dials on their oxygen tanks are ticking down to zero percent.

And... it’s a very nice idea. I think, for a movie with the concept of exploring an underwater haunted house (so to speak) it could have probably stood to be ‘just’ found footage rather than a hybrid... it didn’t feel quite focussed on the delivery of the scares and the way things can be obscured... but it is pretty effective at times and the scares hit more often than miss, I would have to say. There’s a great jump scare early on in the movie involving a fish which really got me, for example.

The two lead actors are pretty good in this too... they do seem to jell as a couple and I have to think this must have been a pretty hard shoot for them (although, I knew the woman would get in trouble as soon as I saw her put her sunglasses up on her head above the eyes in an early part of the film... people who commit this vile act of fashion crime are always going to get into trouble somewhere down the line). More so for the actors who didn’t have the benefit of an on screen oxygen tank to support them and must have been relying on top ups from the crew as the shoot progressed (actually... I’m now hearing it might have been shot dry using a ‘dry for wet’ technique, so to speak, so not sure how this was all achieved, to be honest).

There are some nice little details in the movie too, such as things which change appearance when the characters revisit them later on in their swim. For instance, a Jesus statue with its eyes closed has them open when we see it again later. It all helps create an eerie atmosphere of dread although, the mechanics behind the supernatural shenanigans and their manifestations seems a bit confused at times. Especially when some chains with hooks in the end are attacking one of the characters at one point... there seems to be a kind of series of ‘state changes’ or ‘now you see it, now you don’t’ moments in the movie which clouded the efficacy of the concept throughout, it seemed to me.

But these are merely my little problems with it and I have to say that The Deep House is a nice little entry in the genre which will leave most horror fans, especially lovers of the found footage concept (despite not actually being a proper found footage movie), fairly satisfied, or at least distractingly entertained for the running time. Post credits there’s a kind of pointless extra scene involving one of the characters which, frankly, seems to be there only to show that there could be a sequel made should anyone actually want one. I’m not sure how much more you could squeeze out of the idea in the direction it’s taken here though, to be honest.

*Way back when I wrote this review... I see they now have character
names on the internet but, that’s fine, it saves confusion anyway.