![]() Jagger’s Ben is just a touch away from insufferable, to the point where it became hard to deal with his lines at times…you know, until the horrorshow really started kicking in. That leads me to the lead characters and performances, which are probably my biggest gripe: Jagger and Rowe certainly make a believable and beautiful influencer couple, but they aren’t exactly the most charismatic and likable leads. It’s all very there in the script, that tacky influencer vibe almost like last year’s screenlife horror Spree, but it comes off in a way that shows the insistence, eagerness and desperation in most content creators today. Ben makes note of the fish jumpscare moment and makes sure Tina got it on camera, because that stuff gets views, he says. Speaking of how the film dips into meta territory to reflect the conventions of its haunted house setting, it’s clear the filmmakers were cognizant of the advantages of using that tool in other aspects of the piece, including within the influencer/vlogger storyline. And of course, there’s the whole thing with only having so much oxygen. There’s even a fish jumpscare, which seems lame on paper, but ended up coming off as a meta and effective play on an age-old tactic. The movie also employs the fun and eerie use of underwater spectral elements, which could have been tacky but were pretty scary antagonist presences it’s weirdly frightening to watch a ghost glide through water, to watch them swim. The film plays up the haunted house aspects, and the surrounding elements (i.e., water) make it all the more freaky to follow. See what I’m saying about doing something a bit different? Maury and Bustillo knew what they had at their fingertips-the prospect of a cool underwater haunted house chiller that had never quite been seen before in this way-and used that to their advantage. But under the waters lie more than just clicks and views-there’s something haunted down there, and it isn’t going to let them swim back to the surface without a fight. Below the surface, a perfectly preserved house sits at the bottom of the lake, which is nothing short of a goldmine for the creators who are in a content crunch after their previous dud. ![]() When a particularly exciting location prospect falls through in France, the pair end up visiting a secret and isolated branch of a lake in a forest, which was artificially submerged to prevent devastating floods. Writer/directors Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo’s film follows YouTuber couple Ben (James Jagger) and Tina (Camille Rowe), who are trying to make a name for themselves by exploring the world’s most dangerous and scary locales and filming it for their subscribers. It didn’t quite end up being that, but it didn’t quite end up being a total disappointment either. It felt like the harbinger of things to come, a fun resurgence of gritty lower budget horror flicks that have the adrenaline and the delightfully tacky elements all in one. There are several aquatic nightmare films out there, but nothing has been done like The Deep House yet. It seemed like your typical B-horror fare with a fun edge that had never been brought to screen before. In a genre like horror where unique and groundbreaking stories are as common as those that rehash and try reinventing the wheel, the prospect of a haunted house movie taking place solely underwater was exciting and fresh. Like a meme, I absolutely said “sign me up” out loud after first reading about The Deep House many months ago.
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