The Deep House: Keen Insight Into The Obvious

Imagination is a powerful thing, and there’s a school of thought that says that nothing you put up on a screen can be as frightening as what the audience imagines is happening. Suggestion’s a powerful tool, understatement is a powerful tool, inference is a powerful tool. On the other hand, it’s possible to hint and tease too much and never pay things off. In the words of Stephen King, “sometimes you have to put on the mask and go ooga-booga.” And scary movies can live or die on this. You can set up a ton of atmosphere and dread through suggestion and then the instant you reveal whatever it is, its shortcomings undo all the goodwill you’ve built up. Monster movies are especially vulnerable to this, since it’s so hard to do a good, convincing monster. But for that matter, a movie like Skinamarink, in all of its opacity and unwillingness to really go ooga-booga, plays a dangerous game. I think it succeeded, but it’s certainly a polarizing film and I think that’s part of the reason why. It relies almost entirely on inference.

The Deep House definitely has the opposite problem. It’s a haunted-house story with a mostly-effective new spin on things, but a lot of what it does well is undone by an irritating inability to trust its audience.

We open on blocky, low-res camera footage of two people hiking through a forest toward a large abandoned building somewhere in Ukraine. They’re Ben and Tina, a couple of urban explorers who run a YouTube channel where they document all of the abandoned places they visit. They met in grad school, Ben’s from England, and Tina’s the daughter of French immigrants who landed in Illinois. The YouTube channel was Ben’s idea. On the one hand, it’s because he likes the idea of getting out there and seeing the histories of forgotten places for himself, instead of through the dry expanse of academia. But on the other, he really wants to go viral. He wants millions of views. He wants to be Internet famous, whether he admits it to himself or not. Tina doesn’t really share his passion either for urban exploration or Internet fame. She’s come to enjoy the exploration part, but she mostly tolerates it, for his sake. So she gamely traipses through the abandoned ruins of a hospital in Eastern Europe while Ben jump-scares her for clicks.

The hospital ends up being sort of a bust, but they’ve got something big planned - Ben’s gotten a line on a lake in France that’s isolated and out of the way and has the ruins of an entire village on the lake bed. Never mind abandoned hospitals and factories and whatnot. This is something nobody’s ever explored before, totally undiscovered. So they secure a bunch of diving gear, an underwater camera drone, and plane tickets to France. Tina practices holding her breath underwater.

And when they finally get to this little village in France near where the lake is supposed to be, they find instead a thriving tourist spot, lots of families out on the lake swimming, boating, just having a day by the water. Not at all undiscovered. Tina relaxes a little, suggests they just play tourist for a bit, drink some wine, chill out. Ben sulks. This isn’t how you go viral. But he warms to the idea that they’ll just have a nice little vacation…until a local tells him about a remote branch of the lake deep in the woods, off any road or trail.

One with a single, perfectly preserved house at the bottom.

It is not spoiling anything to say that the house is more than it appears to be, after all, we came here for a horror movie. And yes, it’s basically a haunted-house story, but setting everything underwater does add something to what could have been, on dry land, a pretty stock haunted-house story. This kind of story thrives on atmosphere, and setting the whole thing underwater (and it was shot practically, no cheap CG effects here) means there’s a gloom and murk to it that you wouldn’t get otherwise. The light is fitful, and floating, drifting objects help give it a feeling that’s simultaneously otherworldly and kind of oppressive. There’s also a ticking-clock urgency to it, since they’re diving deep. They have a limited amount of air and will need time to decompress on their way back to the surface. Combined with making their way through what ends up being a sprawling, fairly labyrinthine house that only has one way in or out, and there’s a tight simmering tension to the whole thing.

There’s also a definite, though lower-key, tension to the dynamic between the protagonists. Ben’s a bit unlikable, not especially respectful of Tina’s feelings and overly focused on making his channel a hit. It’s not to the point of obsession or unrealistic, he just comes across as shallow and opportunistic enough that he’s kind of a dick and he’ll probably get them in trouble. Tina cares about him, but you get the sense that she puts up with a lot and has for some time. She wants to be supportive, but he doesn’t make it easy. This isn’t dysfunction on the level of Dani and Christian from Midsommar by any means, but there’s a definite tetchiness that comes up. It’s really played out in asides and sidelong looks and in the way she slips back into French when she says something she doesn’t want Ben to be aware of. It’s easy to infer.

But that’s really the biggest problem with this film - it does do inference and environmental storytelling pretty well, but it’s also unwilling to rely on that to carry the story. It cannot let what we see speak for itself. Once they dive and begin exploring the house, the amount they talk to each other strains credulity, given how limited their air supply is. And this is only made worse by the fact that most of what they’re saying is just describing things both we and they can see for themselves. As they’re swimming through especially murky water, Ben will say “the water’s murky here.” Like, no shit. “There’s a door here.” Yes, we can see that. So can you, so can Tina. So can anyone looking at your footage. It’s almost like the filmmakers didn’t think we could understand what was going on right in front of our faces, so they had to have the characters tell us what we were seeing, and for most of the film it’s pretty grating and works very much against its strengths.

And yes, the alternative would be a film largely devoid of dialogue, but I really do think it could have done with more silence. And it’s not like it would have been an entirely silent film. But it feels like that person who just talks incessantly because they’re uncomfortable with silence. And in the final act it gets worse, with a denouement that just spells out exactly what’s happened in this house, and it’s to the story’s detriment. The important parts have already been figured out by an attentive viewer, and the details they fill in don’t really add anything. It gives us just enough to imagine the worst, and then shows it to us anyway, in case we didn’t get it the first time.

It all serves to mar a film with some really good atmosphere, a nice sense of mounting dread as further exploration of the house reveals an increasingly discomfiting history (spelled out nicely through detail and environmental storytelling in ways that don’t require the protagonists to tell us what we’re seeing even though they do anyway), and a suitably bleak ending.  I don’t know what it is about horror that makes so many filmmakers feel like they have to spoon-feed their audience, but fuck it gets tiresome.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon