[Film Review] Superdeep (2021)

There are fewer things cooler than a horror premise that takes as its basis some facet of inadequately-explored reality. In the case of Superdeep, it’s the real-life Kola Superdeep Borehole, the deepest man has ever dug into the centre of the earth. The Kola Superdeep is absolutely wacky if you read about it – temperatures near the bottom are so hot that the rock behaves more like plastic – so I went into this extremely excited for something truly weird. And I did, in fact, get something weird – I’m just not so sure I got something that worked.

It’s going to be hard to talk about what makes Superdeep disappointing without spoiling it, but I’m going to try. Before we begin, though, I should note that it’s basically impossible to look at contemporary horror coming out of Russia without at least nodding to the fact that you’ll compare it to the powerhouse of alien horror that was 2019’s Sputnik. I mean, lone female scientist called into a Soviet research facility to uncover that something has gone deeply wrong with the quest for scientific knowledge? The comparisons write themselves. But Superdeep doesn’t lean into the right things to achieve the success of its predecessor, on a lot of levels.

One spoiler-free aspect I can definitely talk about is the audio. Good Lord, the audio. The film is clearly shot in Russian, but Shudder made the call to dub over it in Midwestern-America-accented English. The protagonist still has an Eastern European accent because there’s an ongoing bit of dialogue about how her accent is apparently marked, but everyone else speaks like they’re from Ohio. The really obvious dub is incredibly distracting, since there’s zero sync between the way the actors speak and the dialogue. Additionally, it makes it really hard to comment on the performances, since the body language of the actors and the way they’re physically emoting rarely lines up with the tone in which the dialogue is being read. The cognitive dissonance was jarring to the extent that it was hard to follow at points. If they’d kept it in the original language and subtitled it, a fair number of my complaints with this film would go away. The soundtrack is also sort of odd – lots of operatic and ethereal vocalists, which works at odds with the grim brutalist visuals.

Speaking of which, visuals are where this film excels. Most of the film takes place inside Soviet research facilities, and the cinematography does an excellent job of making you feel the soulless nature of the architecture. Lighting in the film is also done to perfection, with wonderfully styled shots and harsh contrasts. In terms of practical effects, which really start to ramp up in the second act and do a lot of the heavy lifting in the third, the visuals are enjoyable and uncomfortable while managing to maintain the same grimy, industrial vibe, even when dealing with organic matter. I could look at Superdeep all day long. 

In terms of plot, Superdeep also doesn’t delve deeply or greedily enough. While the plot pays lip service to the terror of being that far underground with no escape, at no point does it lean into the claustrophobia of being underground, nor the strange unknownness of unexplored terra firma. Instead, it presents a plot very similar to… well, here we’re getting into spoilers, but it’s something that’s been done before, and relatively recently. And while it does what it does just fine, it’s neither incredibly innovative nor incredibly terrifying, though there is one very cringy bit revolving around fingers in shapes they shouldn’t be in. Overall, though, I was left wondering exactly why they’d selected to place the film at the Kola Superdeep Borehole – while it was baked into the plot at points, they didn’t seem to really be doing enough with the specific horrors inherent in the location. With only minor adjustments, this film could have been set anywhere, which is disappointing when there’s such a rich well of weirdness to draw from.

At the end of the day, Superdeep is maybe not even as bad as I’ve painted it to be – the visuals are, again, wonderful, so if you go into film looking for cool sights, you’ll be deeply happy. But it fails in a lot of other important arenas, and things like the dubbed audio, which was maybe a choice out of the control of the original filmmakers, really damages enjoyment of the property. Maybe if the audio hadn’t been dubbed, I’d have gotten to get more into the performances and my review would be radically different, since good characters can, to me, redeem a medium-at-best plot. But that wasn’t the Superdeep Shudder released, and we all have to live with the one they did. If you already have Shudder, this can be fine background noise. Otherwise, just watch Sputnik on Hulu instead. 

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