Review – The Deep House

I understand why guy-with-a-camcorder movies tend to suck. If you’re spending next to nothing to create your magnum opus, you don’t have much incentive to make anything that audiences might actually enjoy. But this isn’t guy-with-a-camcorder drivel. This is a story about a pair of social media producers who scuba dive down to a submerged house, remove a crucifix from the basement door and suffer the consequences. Most of the movie takes place during the dive, requiring a considerable amount of expensive underwater set and camera work. Those parts of the production were genuinely impressive (other than some small details such as modern-looking door handles in a house that had supposedly been at the bottom of a French lake for decades). Unfortunately, the story is nowhere near the equal of the technical quality. The movie hits its halfway point before anything even vaguely supernatural happens. And the script of the back half – consisting mostly of “Ben! Answer me!” screamed over and over – would have been way better suited for extreme low budget garbage than for something that should have been good. And the filmmakers seem to have given almost no thought at all to how viewers would react to the “running out of air” motif. If the protagonists are going to drown no matter what they do, being chased by ghosts is kinda beside the point. I was even disappointed by the bit at the end of the credits, which could easily have been more clever. See if desperate