THE DEEP HOUSE – Maury and Bustillo are at it again. This time they have a gimmick; TDH is an underwater haunted house movie. Two Youtubers hear about a mysterious ruin at the bottom of a lake and decide it’s the hot property that will bring the hits and the ‘likes’ rolling in, so it’s on with the diving gear and the underwater vid cams. M&B derive maximum impact from Jacques Ballard‘s deep-dive cinematography, which is commandingly atmospheric and sets the film’s eerie tone. The fact that most of TDH, which plays out in semi ‘real-time’, is basically just two people wandering from room to room, searching through the subaquatic grot that surrounds them, makes it seem quite entrancing at first. This spell doesn’t last - in time, the constant POV repetition starts to resemble some kind of underwater computer game, and the addition of a fairly by-the-numbers wrap-up leaves you with the impression that there’s more literal than cinematic depth to it. But overall, worth a watch for its atmospherics and slight novelty.
THE LODGE – From the makers of the original ‘Goodnight, Mommy’. A family, transformed by a tragedy that sets the film up with a truly unsettling tone, heads off to a remote, snowy region where their holiday home stands waiting to be filled with the joys of christmas. What follows is another take on warped parental dynamics, a theme familiar from ‘Goodnight Mommy’, and this time the twists and turns are different but the ride is similar. Again, there’s that chilly Euro arthouse feel and a baleful atmosphere, not to mention an overall trajectory that’ll keep you guessing. What’s going on might not be all that hard to decipher in the end and there were some aspects that didn’t quite click for me, but ‘The Lodge’ is a solid thriller, unnerving and compelling. Doesn’t seem to have had much of a release weirdly enough.
SUKKUBUS – We’re off over to the Alps for a dose of hitherto obscure Euro horror from the late eighties. It’s set in the 19th cent; three herdsmen venture up the icy slopes to look after their cows. They seem to be raving sexists, as evinced less by their taste in bawdy singalongs than by their desire to enact violence against a sex toy they’ve made from bits of stump and straw. They’re a bit pent up, you do worry about those cows really. Anyway, magic’s afoot, and what happens next is either supernatural vengeance or otherworldly manipulation depending on your take on this film’s slightly sullen ambiguity; whichever way that goes, naked Pamela Prati turns up to teach them all a few manners. ‘Sukkubus’ is an odd film that to me seems a bit contextless. It’s not original, but I can’t think of much else like it from the time and place (which says more about my ignorance than anything else). I guess today it slots into the retroactively convenient ‘folk horror’ construct that young urbane types seem to natter about on their electronic devices, but for me it simply works as a mood piece. Not much happens – three people go up a mountain and get done in by a succubus, that’s it – though on the other hand aesthetically it’s very nice, with lots of atmospheric shots of snowy mountainsides and a feeling of desolation giving way to something worse, and there’s a progressively more dreamlike edge once we’re at the stage of Prati‘s cavorting. Slight in some ways, but worth checking out if you’re into vaguely aloof, dreamy European horror films.
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