Review: The Deep Dark (2023)
By William Pattison
This time I’m pushing my comfort level with a subtitled French horror film about miners encountering a
monster while trying to takes samples deep in a mine…
Miners are forced to take a professor underground with them,
to take samples for his measurements. After a landslide prevents them from
going back up, they discover a crypt from another time, unknowingly waking up a
bloodthirsty creature.
I’m going to start out by saying that I hate watching subtitled
films. I know some people love watching films in there original language. That
is not me. Give me a bubble version any day and usually Tubi TV usually have
those available. Unfortunately in this case it didn’t so I grabbed my glasses
and tried to read the dialogue. I failed. With my eye issues and the fact I had
to watch this film on my phone they were a blurry mess. I gave up very quickly,
which was annoying because this film was heavy on dialogue. Thank you Tubi for
not providing a dub…bastards!. So without access to dialogue I wasn’t able to
really connect with the characters or even know their names. They were all just
generic miners.
Then, to make it worse, the filmmaker decided to film all
the scenes in the mine by solely head lamps. Yes this did give the scene an
uncomfortable claustrophobic feel, but now I had a lack of visuals to go with
the lack of being able to read the dialogue.
Now, here comes the best part of the film. After an endless
slog the monster arrives finally. I loved how the handled the creature. This
thing was black and though it was bipedal it didn’t look human. The sound the creature makes in
the film sounds like tree branches breaking. It was cool and the filmmaker was
brilliant in how little you actually saw of it. Mostly you saw flashes of the
creature and saw a head lamp fail and hear bones crunching.
This was the best part of the film for me, which wasn’t
much. The monster shows up only in the last
twenty minutes. But, holding the monster off so long gave it weight in
the film because the rest of the film, even including the tunnel caving in was
just plain boring without real access to the dialogue.
All in all I’m not
happy and feel cheated by this film. It had potential to be entertaining, but
it was a slog and out of ninety minutes only the last twenty minutes have a
minimal bit of value. Unless you love subtitles I can’t recommend this film. I
lost seventy-five percent of the film because someone at Tubi or the production
company decided not to include a dubbed edition. Such a fucking waste of time…
As stated you can find this film on Tubi TV…
