Crew
Director/Screenplay – Mathieu Turi, Producers – Thomas Lubeau & Eric Gendarme, Photography – Alain DuPlantier, Music – Olivier Deriviere, Visual Effects Supervisor – Thibault Granier, Visual Effects – Digital District, Makeup Effects Supervisor – Jean-Christopher Spadaccini, Mok’noroth Design – Keisuke Yoneyama, Production Design – Marc Thiebault. Production Company – Full Time Studio/Marcel Films/Vent Debout Productions/OCS/Amazon Prime Video/Equitime 3/Ynnis/Kinology/CNC/Pictanovo/Leg Region Hauts-de-France.
Cast
Samuel Le Bihan (Roland Neuville), Amir El Kacem (Amir), Jean-Hugues Anglade (Professor Berthier), Thomas Soliveres (Louis), Diego Martin (Miguel), Bruno Sanches (Santini), Marc Riso (Polo), Philippe Torreton (Fouassier)
Plot
The north of France, 1956. A group of miners are hired by Professor Berthier to go a thousand metres down a shaft, being offered bonuses to do so. At the bottom, the men uncover a series of catacombs and a tomb that seem to have been used for ritual sacrifices several hundred years ago. However, when some of the men break into the tomb in search of valuables, this serves to free a creature imprisoned there that starts hunting the group in the dark.
The Deep Dark was the third film from French director Mathieu Turi. Turi had first appeared with Hostile (2017) about post-apocalyptic survivors fighting creatures. I had been quite impressed with his second film Meander (2020), an incredibly claustrophobic film about a woman trapped in a series of tight tunnels filled with death traps.
There have been a reasonable body of films dealing with underground horrors from B-budget efforts like The Mole People (1956), The Boogens (1981), Secrets of the Phantom Caverns/What Waits Below (1984) and The Strangeness (1985) to the spate of underground monsters films of the mid-2000s with The Cave (2005), The Cavern/Within (2005), The Descent (2005) and Caved In (2006). (See Centre of the Earth and Underground Adventures).
Mathieu Turi does fairly well with the sustained mood. The light levels in the tunnels are reduced to frequently no more than the lamps on the miner’s helmets. The sets for the mines are constrictive with ceilings that come down to barely over the actors’ head heights. The lighting scheme reduces everything to a uniformly dreary dun brown colour. It is a claustrophobic dank mood that is well sustained the entire way through the film. The downside of this is that it makes it difficult to tell the characters apart where they are all dressed identically and have their faces obscured by helmets with lamps in the centre of them.
When the Mok’noroth creature is unveiled, Turi only gives us partial glimpses – just like Ridley Scott did with the Alien (1979). The design when we see the full-sized creature towards the end is something unearthly and out of this world. The disappointment of the creature, no matter the design, is that to all practical effect it ends up being no more than another Alien-styled Xenomorph. It makes The Deep Dark just a Monster Movie where the Mok’noroth does nothing except snatch people in the dark and tear them apart. I was expecting something that hit the stratosphere of The Descent but in the end Mathieu Turi creates some decent tension but doesn’t go beyond making just another monster movie.
While the plotting is generic, the one surprise is that The Deep Dark ends up being a Lovecraftian Film. I was thinking about the point they kept referring to the creatures as Elder, “this is starting to sound awfully Lovecraftian.” This is clinched the moment that we get a direct reference to Abdul Alhazred, the so-called Mad Arab, known as the author of The Necronomicon in Lovecraftian lore.
Trailer here