The Deep Dark

The beginning of a New French Wave of extremity of 2024 is here! After the awesome Meandre, the talented Mathieu Turi becomes the guarantee of France and his new release is definitely a rewarding creature feature film, actually the best we can see so far this year. A group of miners go into a cave with a professor to collect some samples, only to discover a crypt and awaken an ancient evil with a Lovecraftian twist! The story is pretty simple, but the attractive and novel setting doesn't make it a problem at all. The cave is properly dark and claustrophobic, the characters are cool and don't show any logical flubs. But the big plus is the monster itself, with practical effects and a nice mythology around it, it looks properly creepy and unpleasant, even if it's a bit of a shame that it doesn't appear until an hour into the film. There's some decent gore, of course, and as always, it there could have been more, but it's sufficient. The atmosphere also works well, the most atmospheric sequence for me was the one where they use a photo-camera, a proven sure thing! For me, a very fine monster survival flick with miners that shouldn't offend anyone. So far this year a clear horror number one, so show your gratitude and sprinkle those 4's! 75% (04/03/2024)

A very well executed subterranean horror adventure. The setting is great a horror film, plus it works with the Indiana Jones theme of exploring forgotten spaces left behind by ancient civilizations – on paper it all sounds like they've refined the film just for me. It was also to see that there's plenty of time spent introducing the characters in the opening, so they don't just act as fungible meat for the slaughter. So why only mild genre satisfaction? For one thing, the film is atmospheric, but not at all scary. The monster is designed quite nicely, but it looks strangely stiff, and like it would disintegrate if you lightly poked it. And secondly – and this was a bigger problem for me – the script is a real pain in the second half of the film. We spend long minutes with the professor walking around the cave with his journal and a very forced mythology to let us know what we are dealing with. And that impression of scripted sanity is completely lost when the other characters (not qualified miners!) start digging through the professor's diary (supposedly summarising 27 years of research) and successfully deciphering ancient writing from his notes. I mentally told the filmmakers to just let the characters mindlessly run through the underground passages and not make up such crap. (04/03/2024)

So I don't know if we've watched the same movie, but I feel everything is wrong. Mathieu Turi didn't win me over with Meander, a much-anticipated film that turned out to be bollocks in the end, and it's the same with The Deep Dark. After all, if you go for a claustrophobic creature feature in the mines, you expect the "monster" to appear before the (literally) first hour is up and that the visuals will at least be passable. But here, the entire first half is reprehensibly slow and drawn out, and the look of the monster is so terribly cheap – I certainly wouldn't have expected a cheap monster slowly swinging on strings in such a fairly decent looking film. The kills are also rather second-rate, the French language didn't allow me to honestly empathise with the characters and although some of the mythology around it wasn't entirely pointless, the film as a whole, including the slow build-up, the generic finale and the uninteresting progression or unused atmosphere, was very lifeless and a big misstep. It's amazing how the reviews here can diverge... (05/10/2024)