The Deep House (2021)

The French writer-directorial team of Bustillo and Maury hit the mark with 2007’s Inside (marketed in France as À l'intérieur) – an extreme film in which a weird woman forces her way into a home and torments a mother-to-be on Christmas Eve. Widely praised, it employed spectacular lighting and special effects but held itself aloft of most concerns with plot.

With The Deep House, Bustillo and Maury again co-wrote and co-directed. The premise is straightforward: An attractive young couple journeys to a French lake to scuba dive down to a submerged home and share their finds on YouTube (giving the film a found footage feel for certain segments). But within the murky house, a malevolency dwells.

With digitization and CGI threatening to overwhelm filmmaking, the authenticity of the underwater photography here is refreshing. It brought to my mind the extended underwater filmography of Creature from the Black Lagoon – without which that classic film would have lost much of its potency. A “suffocating” atmosphere is effectively conveyed by the tenuous supply of oxygen at a depth which is unaccommodating to human breath. The atmosphere is thick; even in daylight, it’s dim down there.

The boastful, narcissistic couple deserve some corrective scares. They’re a bit too sure of themselves and confident of their scientific worldview. They’ve earned a wake-up call from the spirit world. And they get one.

Reportedly, the deep house itself was constructed on grids and submerged in a nine-by-twenty-meter tank. That’s a big tank.

Atmosphere and set construction aside, however, is there much of a film here?

The scenes are bathed in eeriness. The architecture is drenched in spookiness. The set designs are soaked with dread.

But, I’m sorry to say, the plot drifts and the characterization is watery at best.

The movie is worth watching, though the narrative bits don’t go all that swimmingly. But the film is still a pretty good catch. It floats my boat. I think you’ll lake it.