The Deep House

[Note: I have Covid for the first time and will likely be out of action for a while as I recuperate]

Haunted House stories have been around so long that they’ve evolved into an easily-recognised standard narrative structure. You start out with unseen voices and half-glimpsed shadows, move on to electrical interference and creaking doors, and then right around the time our protagonists are seeing actual apparitions, they stumble on the secret room or whatever that reveals the house’s backstory.

This is such a common story structure that it’s long since ceased to even be a cliche. If you make a horror movie following these beats, not even the most fresh-faced viewer is likely to find the result frightening or engaging.

But what if the house was Underwater? Would that inject some life into the hoary old formula?

No, it turns out, but The Deep House gives it a good try anyway.

Our protagonists are Ben and Tina, a go-getting young couple looking to get famous on Youtube by exploring haunted locations. Traveling through France, they learn about a well-preserved house at the bottom of a reservoir from a creepy guy who is obviously evil, and decide to dive down and have a look. It does not go well.

This is an arresting idea for a horror movie, and at first it appears to be making good on its promise: the underwater scenes are moody and atmospheric, the fact that the interior of the house is eerily well-preserved is something the audience is allowed to figure out before the characters do, and in general I was fully on board with wherever the movie was going during its opening act.

Alas, things quickly start to go awry. To begin with, the movie doesn’t just adhere rigidly to the classic tropes of the haunted house story, but to the much more specific cliches that were birthed by modern found footage movies (The Deep House switches back and forth between first-person found footage and traditional camerawork). You’ve got the girlfriend who recognizes the danger for what it is and wants to walk away, who is coupled with a stubborn boyfriend who refuses to put the camera down and stop poking the hornet’s nest. You’ve got the creepy local who leads the duo to the haunted location and who is clearly up to no good. You’ve got a backstory involving occult rituals and human sacrifice in service to some vaguely-defined demonic/witchy entity.

It turns out that putting all of this underwater doesn’t actually make it feel any fresher; in fact, it introduces brand new problems.

When things are calm and our two leads are leisurely exploring the house, the movie does a good job of balancing the murky darkness of the lake bottom with letting the audience see what’s actually happening; no it’s, not particularly realistic that there’s tons of light pouring in from the outside, but making the house realistically dark would have been annoying.

This goes out the window as soon as the really spooky shit pops off. Suddenly, the camera lens (the movie usually switches to found footage for these scenes) is obscured by swirling bubbles, flashlight beams and silt, such that at times it can be difficult to figure out what’s even supposed to be happening.

This isn’t helped by the fact that some of the scares are a little hard to parse just on their own terms. There’s one bit where Tina either gets attacked by hanging chains or is pulled into some sort of whirlpool—I honestly couldn’t tell which—and there’s a recurring thing where the underwater drone the couple are using gets possessed or something and starts emitting a sinister red light. I’m still not really sure what’s going on with that.

Like a lot of found footage movies, The Deep House doesn’t really know what to do with itself once the low-key build-up phase ends, and so we get lots of interminable scenes of Tina and Ben yelling each other’s names over and over again, a big clumsy exposition scene where the backstory of the house is explained in way more detail than is necessary, and then some confusing and disorienting action.

Even the underwater gimmick, ostensibly the movie’s main selling point, gets essentially discarded for a big chunk of the middle of the movie—a lot of the scenes in the second half could have taken place quite easily in an ordinary house instead of a Deep House, and the fact that Ben and Tina are running on a strict oxygen time limit is forgotten about for just long enough that the concept loses all tension.

Overall then, this is a case of a really interesting idea that the film makers didn’t seem to know how to actually turn into a compelling movie. Kind of a shame.