The Deep House

            “Everything’s weird underwater,” says Ben (James Jagger) to comfort his skittish girlfriend Tina (Camille Rowe) as they plan to dive down in a remote lake in Southwest France to explore (on camera) an entire house buried underwater. In directors Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury’s supremely scary new film, premiering on EPIX on Friday November 5, no truer words were ever spoken.

            Ben, a Brit, and his girlfriend Tina have been filming their exploits and streaming them online, whether exploring a creepy abandoned hospital in the Ukraine, or other supernatural-related places. They have set their sights on a lake in France where an entire town was submerged years before. But when they get to the near-deserted village they find the lake populated with swimmers and boaters and hardly what they had hoped for.

             Tina decides to just relax and have fun for the day, but Ben meets up with a local- Pierre (Eric Savin), who offers to take them to the other side of the lake where they will find their intact underwater house. They end up trekking miles through the woods with their scuba and camera equipment to the out-of-the-way spot and get ready (along with an underwater drone) to explore. 

            And as they dive deeper they do find the house alright, but it’s difficult to enter. But they find an opening near the attic where they can send in the drone and then follow after. They find the house completely furnished, with creepy dolls floating around and as they explore, darker and more frightening things await them. I refuse to say much more except that this mix of found footage and narrative really gets claustrophobic and terrifying as they weave through this hellish house of horrors. The two leads likability is a key factor as to why this works so well. That with sumptuous, gothic art direction inside the house and clever camera work makes the film genuinely frightening.

            Directors Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury were part of that new wave of gory, gritty horror films by French directors with their nightmarish home invasion movie Inside starring a terrifying Beatrice Dalle. The films that followed were exceptional as they were ferocious. Livide, about a home care worker and her criminal boyfriend who break into the wrong house to rob. Or Among the Living about some hapless kids who skip school to wander around an abandoned film studio only to find themselves witness to a horrific crime by a weird, masked man. The simplicity and streamlined scares of The Deep House are an exceptional return to form for these talented directors. They have crafted a razor-sharp aquatic nightmare that, quite honestly, scared the shit out of me.

(On EPIX Friday November 5, and for Digital Purchase via Paramount Home Entertainment)