[Film Review] The Deep House (2021)

A YouTube couple who specializes in posting their adventures in urban spelunking decides to explore an abandoned home submerged at the bottom of a reservoir in southern France only to find it may not be so abandoned after all. 

I am pretty scared of swimming in any body of water that’s not a pool. And this film perfectly illustrates exactly why that is. Is that a fish bumping my leg or the possessed bodies of corpses floating out of the submerged house they’ve been lying in wait for? Who can say, really? In all seriousness though, this film really took me by surprise. I stumbled on it while wasting time before the Super Bowl and found it impossible to turn off by the time the game came on. 

James Jagger co-stars as Ben, an enterprising millennial with eyes for likes and subscriptions but also for his fiancée and channel partner, co-star Tina played by Camille Rowe. Together, they travel to abandoned places and go poking around. Tina is in it for the exploration and vacation, Ben wants to launch their careers. These two motivations are clearly at odds and when they travel to a reservoir they heard about in southern France with a submerged asylum, they find only a family vacation spot. Tina’s happy to enjoy the day but Ben happens upon a local named Pierre (Eric Savin) who can lead them to a house that was completely submerged (and impeccably well preserved) when the river was dammed. 

Down the pair go with an hour of oxygen each and find an entire property complete with family crypt and spacious mansion as they begin exploring. Their equipment starts to act a little strange (odd voices come through their waterproof music player and their underwater drown picks up odd echoes and movement) but they move through the home finding left behind toys, a disturbing collection of missing children posters, and, of course, a massive crucifix blocking the entrance to a hidden room off the kitchen. Naturally, they have to go in there and what they find turns their trip from a viral exploration video to a life or death escape with pressure minutes of oxygen slipping away. 

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This film combines two subgenres in horror that are so far apart it feels like they might have been picked out of a hat and assigned as a cruel joke--the stress-filled underwater claustrophobia film and the slow-burning demon house tale. But writers and directors Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo pull it off pretty flawlessly, creating an engaging 85 minutes of screen time which mostly takes place with our leads weighed down by scuba suits (and voiced by some sometimes clunky ADR dialogue) and gliding through the halls of this abandoned home. 

The visuals are stunning, with each set design given optimal time to shine as creepily as possible-- a floating grand piano, stairs stacked reminiscent of the scene in Poltergeist, glowing fog of sediment casting an eerie veil over the home’s many rooms. We get ample time to scan the screen, picking out small details tucked into the corner of the home, which makes the film’s few jump scares effective. There are several sequences in particular where Maury and Bustillo understood the true disturbing beauty of the slow chase scene and the ambient sounds of deep water are perfect accents to nearly every shot.

While my preference would have been to play into the mystery of the location and let the details of what happened there be left to the imagination of the viewer, the revelations and climax are ultimately unsettling and satisfying, if predictable, even if certain elements (like the underwater drone occasionally becoming seemingly possessed and throwing on the HAL-9000 lights or the inordinate amount of dolls and mannequins throughout the home) not really landing beyond the aesthetics. It’s pretty creepy and I can’t fault it for that, even if the writing isn’t exactly ground-breaking. 

If you’re looking for boundary-pushing formats in horror this may not be The Blair Witch Project but certainly is a solid technical achievement that manages to be nuanced in the types of fears it wants to call upon and the pantheon of scares a horror filmmaker has at their disposal. If you want something creepy and different, this is it.

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