This is a Weird Olympic Event

Film: Deep Fear
Format: Streaming video from Hoopla on my phone.

I don’t generally watch a lot of movies on my phone, but needs must. I spent Sunday through Wednesday with my brother in North Carolina tending our father, and time alone to watch a movie or two was essentially not available to me. So, knowing that I had a 90-minute or so flight on Wednesday, I downloaded Deep Fear (also called Bunker 717) on my phone for the flight home. You don’t need to pay for wifi if the movie is already loaded on the device. A horror movie seems like a weird choice for an airplane, but I figured I could watch it without anyone looking over at me, and the film was about the length of the flight, so it all worked out.

Deep Fear has similarities to a lot of other films. As Above, So Below, which also takes place in the Paris catacombs, is an obvious connection, but it feels like there are elements of Creep and a few others, too. This is a film that takes place far under the streets and under the Paris Metro, deep in the ancient catacombs. If you are at all a claustrophobe (and I very much am), there are going to be some parts of this that will be difficult for you to sit through. You’ve been warned.

We start with a graffiti artist in 1989 in Paris working on something when he is suddenly attacked. We then jump ahead two years to 1991 where we meet Henry (Victor Meutelet), who is about to be inducted into the army. For his last day, his friends Sonia (Sofia Lesaffre) and Max (Kassim Meesters) decide to give him a memorable day. Sonia decides that this is going to be heading down below the Paris Metro into the catacombs, which is highly illegal and potentially dangerous. Guiding them will be Ramy (Joseph Olivennes), who appears to be comfortable in the catacombs.

This is going to involve some crawling areas that were, honestly, tough to watch. Poor Max is a collection of phobias, and were I him, I would not have gone into the catacombs; seriously, the dude is scared of small spaces, the dark, and just about everything else they might encounter. We meet a few other people in the catacombs, one of whom, Lamia (Léone François-Janssens) says that she spends time in the catacombs because her brother went missing two years earlier.

It’s not all small spaces and hints to the intro, though. As the quartet goes deeper into the catacombs, they encounter a group of neo-Nazis, who are fought off because Sonia managed to bring a gun with her. Eventually, the crew finds an entry into an area of the catacombs that has not been mapped. They explore, and it turns out that this unmapped area is a German bunker from World War II, complete with flags, supplies, and what appears to be an abattoir. And it’s very soon evident that they are not alone in the bunker.

There’s a lot going on in Deep Fear, and while that’s possibly a strength of the film, it’s also a very clear issue. It takes forever for us to get where we’re going and where the film wants to get to. Henry falls prey to a booby trap nearly an hour into the film and we don’t find the bunker until around the same time, and the film is only about 84 minutes long. In some respects, it feels a bit like The Descent. We get some real scares before we get to what is ultimately the real threat of the film.

In that respect, Deep Fear feels very disjointed. It feels real because of that—we go from finding something cool to them running for their lives. Squeezing through a tight spot is followed by a cool area underground. But, while this works for making the film feel like a real story, it doesn’t really feel like a movie in the traditional sense.

Probably the best way to put it is that Deep Fear feels like a found footage film without actually being a found footage film. There are a few spots where we see what Max is filming or has filmed, but it’s not the main part of the film. The rest of it feels like it should be, though, and it's a little surprising that it’s not.

Is it good? It’s not bad. It’s not something I necessarily want to watch again, but it’s not bad.

Why to watch Deep Fear: It goes places that are very unexpected.
Why not to watch: It takes a long time to really get going.