THE DEEP HOUSE (2021)

Studio:     Paramount Home Entertainment
Director:    Alexandre Bustillo, Julien Maury
Writer:     Alexandre Bustillo, Julien Maury, Rachel Parker, Julien David
Producer:  Clement Miserez, Matthieu Warter, Frederic Fiore, Eric Tavitian, Jean-Charles Levy
Stars:     James Jagger, Camille Rowe

Review Score:

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Summary:

A ghost-hunting couple investigates a reportedly haunted house submerged in a forested French lake.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Guided to the location by an odd local named Pierre, amateur urban explorer Ben and his hesitant girlfriend Tina use scuba gear to investigate a reportedly haunted house submerged in a flooded French forest. Inside a secret room, Ben and Tina find the inexplicably preserved corpses of homeowners Mister and Madam Montegnac wearing torture masks while suspended from chains above a satanic sigil on the floor.

Further searching eventually reveals that Pierre is the dead couple’s son. Pierre and his father used to kidnap children from the area to use as human sacrifices in occult rituals. Local farmers then took revenge by torturing the Montegnacs and murdering their daughter Sarah while Pierre escaped.

Ben and Tina separately experience several haunting visions. They also discover they cannot leave the house when they find a brick wall suddenly blocking the exit.

The bodies of Mister and Madam Montegnac come alive to swim after Ben and Tina. When they regroup later, Tina finds Ben in a strange trance.

Ben brings Tina to a room where a home video reveals the truth about the Montegnacs. Sarah Montegnac’s ghost appears. While under Sarah’s spell, Ben repeatedly tells Tina to join the family with him. Tina stabs Ben, which shakes him out of his trance. Sarah then stabs Ben to death.

Sarah and her parents grab at Tina. To escape the phantoms, Tina detaches her diving gear and begins swimming upward. However, Tina runs out of air before reaching the lake’s surface and drowns.

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Review:

Underwater sequences are a massive momentum killer in entertainment. Remember the laborious Little Mermaid level in the original “Kingdom Hearts,” or any underwater interlude in any video game at all, even “Super Mario Bros?” James Cameron’s work rightly has its ardent admirers, but his submerged scenes in “Titanic” and a big bulk of the widely beloved “The Abyss” are also rather boring if we’re being totally truthful.

That sleepiness can’t be helped really. It’s simply the nature of scuba-style navigation that makes dankly darkened depths an inherently dull location for slow-moving action and murkily muddy visuals.

In the case of “The Deep House” on the other hand, setting a routine terror tale beneath a woodland lake seemed like exactly the sort of atmospheric shot in the arm that the stale ‘haunted house’ subgenre desperately needs. Plus, the movie comes from famed French filmmaking duo Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, who are best known for their landmark thriller “Inside” (review here). Even when they’re not on their A game, Bustillo and Maury can always be counted on to produce intriguing efforts worthy of horror filmdom’s attention for one reason or another.

Unfortunately, although not unpredictably, “The Deep House” can’t help but be bit by the same slowness bug that unavoidably comes from being sunk beneath the sea. And despite taking a typical haunting to atypically drown it in water, “The Deep House” still suffers from the same common clichés and pacing problems that plague so many similar supernatural chillers regardless of where they take place.

Instead of waving flashlights while tiptoeing down cobwebbed corridors, our intrepid investigators (a relatively rude British guy and his girlfriend who isn’t keen on paranormal spelunking in the first place, let alone when indefinitely holding your breath is involved) cautiously swim through barnacled hallways with body-mounted lanterns. Instead of bumps in the night and fleeting figures, we get gurgling bubbles and billowy shadows. So while we may technically be out of the familiar old gothic mansion, we remain in well-trod territory that squarely belongs to discarded dolls, satanic sigils, and a mild mystery that incrementally unfolds across newspaper clippings, family photos, and home movie footage conveniently uncovered during late-stage exposition.

Normally when I write detailed synopses to hide underneath the spoiler button above, they can easily run upwards of 1,000 words or more even though I’m only aiming for a Cliff’s Notes recap. But “The Deep House’s” two-person setup is so pared down, major plot points can be summarized in a few sentences. As a matter of fact, the middle sentences in that summary can even be replaced with “yadda, yadda, yadda” and an average reader can get the entire gist of the movie without missing a single important beat.

A regular review also usually runs at least 750 words on average. Once again however, “The Deep House” is so straightforwardly simple that I’m not even at 500 right now, yet I’ve already run out of meaningful matters to opine over.

I often look down on amateur indie films, the do-it-yourself DTV’ers as opposed to modestly financed mid-road movies like this one, who take the easy road by exploiting one safe location to cheaply cut-and-paste rote haunted house horror. “The Deep House” earns extra credit by going an extra mile with its location, as that mile goes straight down into the drink where it’s infinitely tougher to light, film, act, and lug equipment around while simultaneously staying conscious of everyone’s oxygen supply. Kudos to the cast and crew for the additional effort expended to do things differently.

In the end though, “The Deep House” doesn’t do those things all that differently, and settles solely for submerging its standard spooky stuff in seawater. I have a strong suspicion that should “The Deep House” come up in anyone’s future fright film conversations, it’ll merely be mentioned as “Oh yeah, that was the one that was underwater, right?” and that’s about it.

Review Score: 55

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