It’s not often that movies are actually filmed in and take place primarily underwater but if done right, it feels like the perfect angle for a horror movie.
Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s The Deep House gives you just enough time to take in one big breath before diving head first into the cold waters of a French man made lake for the rest of its runtime.
In this particular lake is an abandoned mansion that conjures a young haunted travel vlogging couple, Ben and Tina played by James Jagger and Camille Rowe, to monetarily explore its eerie presence.
Expecting to find only the large structure left standing on the lake floor, what they find inside is much more than expected and with absolutely no means of escape. This mansion is enormous and that’s clear when the couple descend upon it and swim around its exteriors but once inside the completely boarded up place, the many creepy rooms still mostly preserved in completely surrounding watery darkness makes you feel uncomfortably claustrophobic.
The dark and sinister history of the Montegnac Mansion is awakened by the arrival of its latest guests and so this aquatic exploration quickly turns into a horrifying race against time and the terrors that still lurk within this sunken purgatory. Sanity levels deplete even faster than the supplied oxygen tanks do and it fully illustrates wave after wave of dreadful and hopeless panic.
Bustillo and Maury have collaborated on a handful of horror movies since the early 2000s. From their first and still best work on the 2007 film Inside, each movie sadly seemed to get worse from there, especially their 2017 Leatherface film. This movie is easily their 2nd best movie so far. The Deep House is a rather straightforward horror movie but with technical design that is just exceptionally incomparable to any other horror movie out there.
Check it out on Hulu or Paramount Plus.
“Hey Kimi. Play Sabotage.”
Each year or so it feels like a new Steven Soderbergh movie comes out of nowhere and it’s always a pleasant surprise. With minimal marketing in place, tailored for at home streaming, it sure feels like his movies come out of nowhere.
With his latest Tech Thriller Kimi, Steven Soderbergh continues to show off his technical ingenuity behind the camera with some low-cost yet highly rewarding movie magic. It’s about what you’d expect from his adapted style of filmmaking and it makes for an interestingly intense watch. Kimi is shades of similar films of the past like Rear Window, Blow Out, Blow Up and The Conversation just to name a few off the top of my head and Soderbergh’s spin on it is a fantastic blend of homage with some modern originality.
Since Unsane, Soderbergh has continued to bring the world his style of filmmaking right at home. He found a way to get his movie seen regardless of the changing theatrical landscape due to technical changes or far more difficult circumstances like a global pandemic and has continued to find success in it. It’s strange to think that he adapted to this style of filmmaking a few years before the world truly changed because of the pandemic and in these most uncertain times there is one thing for certain and that’s the fact that Steven Soderbergh has basically mastered the streaming release at this point. He sort of had a head start on filmmakers that only recently have sought to still make art during these strenuous times.
The film takes place primarily in one spacious yet confining apartment and in it, we get personal with Zoe Kravitz in a world not too far off from our own. Covid, mask wearing, remotely working from home, having some severe socially crippling anxiety disorders, and especially the darker side of the tech world. Kimi keeps things painfully real.
While the film doesn’t hold the political or social weight that many tech conspiracy thrillers before it held, that doesn’t mean Zoe Kravitz took her role lightly. She goes all in as a complex leading character and she pulls off yet another superb performance as Angela Childs, a millenial blue haired agoraphobic tech analyst turned hitmen ass-kicking badass.
Kimi is an effectively startling tech conspiracy thriller conveniently available for you to watch right now on HBOmax.
The Spectators' Odyssey 