Limnal and subliminal
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — The Deep House
gorgsharpy — 4 years ago(October 09, 2021 11:40 PM)
How Deep Is Your House?
Alice in Horrorland
The Deep House (2021)
Spoilers,
The French directorial duo Maury and Bustillo's horror films operate on the subliminal level. The Deep House is no exception.
The first sequence contains the key to the film's central conflict. The loving couple Ben and Tina are youtubers with abandoned buildings as their specialty. Ben's goal is to get rich, get married in Las Vegas and buy a house and start a family. But there is a disharmony in the relationship. Ben likes to scare Tina, she puts up with it, follows him a bit like a zombie, draws no boundaries, does what he wants. She has an insecurity that borders on existential anxiety. One thinks Ben loves her, tries to make her happy by giving her the shining image she desires, but he can not help teasing her with her weak sides. It's a couple in a kind of crisis. The film that follows is in fact a poetic nightmare that, by the means of the subconscious, shows how their relationship unfolds and ends.
The story of the film is overall that they dive into an abandoned house on the bottom of a French lake with cameras to record the ultimate youtube video. The house turns out to their surprise to have been the subject of horrific crimes against children, satanism and also revenge crimes against the criminals (a married couple). Ben and Tina are confronted with both victims and perpetrators in various guises - dead, resurrected, ghosts. The couple thus wakes up - real or experienced - from the dead and chases Ben and Tina. But Ben and Tina suddenly can not get out of the house again, exits are mysteriously blocked in the usual way and the oxygen is about to run out. Tina's reaction is horror, while Ben can not let go of his curiosity. He handles the horror as a condition (living conditions) and even finds a cinema in one of the basement rooms of the house, which plays a film of the crimes, while a victim, the daughter, breaks out through the screen in a nice homage to i.a. Suspiria.
Ben does not escape, he does not want to, but he ends up staying in the house. At the bottom. He is one with the horror universe, the film medium, facing the deep horror. Tina, the peace lover, on the other hand, manages to escape from the house and symbolically leaves behind the camera, because she is now ethically established and has distanced herself from her superficial youtube life. On her way to the surface, she suddenly takes off her diving mask and in the duo's perhaps most beautiful image sequence ever, she drowns (herself?), floating in water illuminated by the light from above. It's a metaphor. She is free from the unhealthy relationship with Ben. It is a spiritual act, a kind of weightlessness, like the candlestick, a showdown with reality. Lovecraft's strange words, from the house, resound. “That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die.” In another state of mind, death is no longer a function of reality, but must also submit to age. The post credit scene implies their destinies may depend on the sexes.
Maury and Bustillo regularly mirror Ben and Tina with the couple. The masks are the same, the diving masks and the masks the couple in their death were tied with. The experience in the house is not only the discovery of a past crime scene, but also a subconscious flashforward to the notion of what Ben and Tina's life together would be after fame, with marriage, villa, the birth of children and perhaps the killing of children. The film thus revolves around the directors' usual themes from e.g. Inside and Livid about family, the relationship between parents and children as well as the liberation from these roles. And not least in this film about the existential relationship to the horror of life. At the same time, it is a film about film and about modern media. Both Ben and Tina free themselves from the youtube dream. The oxygen level on their Apple Watch-like display counts down as the battery on a slightly too smart phone, and at 0 you do not die, but just find your true identity. -
gorgsharpy — 10 months ago(May 18, 2025 01:04 AM)
Yeah she did. But it's well done. In the opening scenes, she lies to her boyfriend about being able to hold her breath for more than three minutes. When it's really 1.45 or so. So. There is already there a unhealthy strain in their relationship. However, in the end, before the cinema drama, he reckoned she would be able to hold it for three … and the big suspense … as she swims towards the surface … will she make it. It's so well done. The cyclic narrative.
Just watched Tom Cruise repeat the scene in MI8, btw.
Schrodinger's Cat walks into a bar, and doesn't. 