The Deeper You Dig: Living With Our Ghosts

Ghost stories are often stories of regret - maybe not on the part of the ghost, but on the part of the people the ghost leaves behind. Relationships vary, but haunting is often a metaphor for mistakes, bad decisions, and traumas, the ghost a constant reminder of things that cannot be undone. Stories along this line are a nice change from ghosts as evil, screaming things with hideously distorted faces who are bumping people off for reasons. Monsters are always more interesting, I think, when they’re rooted in humanity and horrors rooted in human experience. And from that perspective, The Deeper You Dig is a well-crafted low-budget indie film about guilt, finding meaning in the wake of a tragedy, and living with our ghosts.

It’s a simple film, about three people in a small town in the Catskills region of New York. Kurt is quiet and reclusive, occupied with the gutting and restoration of an old, long-abandoned house that he’s going to fix up and flip. Ivy is a psychic - or, at least, she makes her living as a psychic, keenly attuned to the necessity of stringing her clients along, not giving them what they keep coming to her for just yet. Not while there’s still money to be had. And Echo is Ivy’s daughter, a Goth kid at home in in her own skin, self-possessed and comfortable in her relationship with her mother. It’s the middle of winter, and life’s proceeding as it does - Echo’s annoyed that her teacher told her she can’t wear black lipstick to school, Ivy offers to kick the teacher’s ass. Echo wants to go sledding tonight but Ivy tells her to wait because she’s got an appointment with a regular client and doesn’t want Echo out on her own. They talk about the upcoming deer season, and Echo’s goal of bagging her seventh buck in under twenty minutes.

Kurt’s working on the upper floor of the house - sweeping out garbage, tearing out old plaster. He’s tearing it down to the studs, and that’s tough work. He stops for dinner, a few beers, a few shots to chase the few beers. After the shots and beers, he gets back into his car to drive home. It’s dark on the road at night, and he spots deer leaping across the road in his headlights. And then he hits something with a solid thud.

It’s not a deer. It’s Echo, who’d gone sledding after all.

This film is especially notable for being a literal family affair - it's written, directed, produced, shot and edited by a husband-and-wife team and one of their two daughters. They had some outside help for visual effects and publicity, but this film is overwhelmingly the product of three people, all of whom play the central roles in the film as well. I knew this going in and was expecting sort of a scrappy, "hey gang, let's put on a show" sort of thing, but it isn't really that at all. It's somber and striking, with an extremely strong visual sense and the all-too-rare ability to deliver something that works while staying inside the constraints of a small budget. This film looks and plays far less cheaply than some horror films made by studios and ostensibly professional filmmakers. It is a film that knows its limitations and knows what it can do inside of those limitations.

To start, it’s a story told at a very human, almost intimate scale. It’s about how Kurt deals with (or doesn't deal with) what he's done, his attempts to cover it up, and Ivy's attempts to find some answers to the mystery of a missing daughter in the wake of a faith long-abandoned for cynical opportunity. Over the course of the film, the two of them are drawn closer and closer together, Echo's death being the black hole pulling them both into its gravity. Kurt is haunted by what he’s done, by the choices he can’t take back, and Ivy is someone who knows something about the worlds of the living, the dead, and the space between. They’re both digging, sometimes literally, sometimes metaphorically, getting in deeper and deeper and finally over their heads. It's not an especially intense film, with very, very little in the way of jump scares. It relies much more on small things - unexplained noises, the sound of footsteps where there shouldn’t be any, radios that shouldn't be playing, figures that are suddenly in frame when a shot changes angle - interspersed with striking sequences that are equally surreal and nightmarish. Its scares are tasteful and restrained - sometimes maybe too much so. The pace of the film is deliberate, stately, though it doesn’t drag. The result is a film that doesn’t really build up a lot of tension until the very end. What's there works and works extremely well - there are a couple of story choices I wasn’t expecting that kept me on my toes and ratcheted things up a bit, but sometimes the tension flags.

Where it succeeds to the greatest degree is in its visuals - this film has a really strong sense of composition, shots are painterly and use light, shadow and texture in combination with creative perspective to tell a story otherwise communicated through sparse, halting dialogue (which is fine, though the acting can be somewhat shaky and is probably the only place where it's clear this is a low-budget indie production). The passage of time gets told through changes in seasons, from snow to rain to sunny, all set against the rural backdrop of a New York that exists far from the city, all trees and mountains and tiny little towns made up of a main drag and houses set far, far back into the woods. It's hunting and fishing territory, moving between winters that verge on the oppressive, raw, rainy thaws, and autumns that turn everything gold. It’s evocative in its location, in its shots, in its editing, in its lighting and its score (which, for all I know, was done by the family as well).

And all of this is the backdrop for the story of a woman brought back to her gifts by a horrible tragedy, a man whose guilt is almost literally eating him from the inside out, and the nightmare prices paid for some kind of closure and reconciliation. Kurt does everything he can to run away from what he’s done, but you can’t run away from what you carry with you, and this becomes true in some unsettlingly literal ways as this man, the girl he killed, and the mother looking for her lost daughter come together in a reckoning. If you're looking for something to make you jump out of your seat, this is probably not it, but if you want something equal parts sad and creepy with a growing undercurrent of menace, something with a vision that encompasses the beautiful and the strange and the morbid in equal parts, this is definitely worth a look.

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