Main cast: James Jagger (Ben), Camille Rowe (Tina), and Éric Savin (Pierre Montégnac)
Directors: Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury
If we go by horror films of today, more Americans die in European countrysides compared to American ones—clearly, the cannibalistic hillbillies of American redneck counties have nothing on the haunted homes in rural corners of the other, vulgar English-speaking continent.
At least The Deep House offers something new: the house in question is completely underwater. There are two directors for this one, perhaps because of the technical issues involved in filming things that take place below water level.
Ben and Tina are two American YouTubers that specialize in recording and sharing their experiences in various supposedly haunted locales. Well, the engaged couple are in France to seek out a purportedly haunted sanitarium in a location that is now an artificial lake, but they find that there are too many tourists around for them to get a good show out of this.
A local, Pierre, suggests an alternative. There is something similar not too far away, a haunted mansion that is now submerged when the area was flooded by the government as a means to prevent recurring flash floods in that area. So off these two go, with enough oxygen for about an hour, and gee. who knows what they will find in that place…
This one boasts the usual, and sometimes tired, old stuff prevalent in movies of this kind. Jump scares, some ghostly female thing, possession and subsequent violent tendencies, and plenty of shaky cam shots and dim lights.
The latter, of course, is the popular trick of gimmicky bandwagon people hoping to do cheap scares without actually working to earn those scares. Oh, you can’t see anything? Here’s a loud noise – waaaargh! See, you’re now scared, and their work is done. The whole thing is like a particularly annoying found footage recorded by ghosts or something.
Take away the novelty of a formulaic jump scare buffet taking place underwater, and this one is just another one of the many cheap, indistinguishable “Ma, I’m a in a dark house, can’t someone dim out the lights and start the jump scare fest on the audience?” movies out there.
In the end, this is a great and cheap way for streaming services to pad their catalog, but it’s still another generic, formulaic tale of idiots not taking proper safety precautions while chasing social media clout. Given how annoying these cardboard cutouts are, constantly arguing and doing dumb things to further the jump scare agenda, I’d say they deserve what they get, for being what they are as well as for subjecting me to their banal story.
