On the face of it, Mathieu Turi’s The Deep Dark might scan as a Descent-esque adventure horror about a group of people getting stuck underground and discovering a fearsome monster. And in an oblique sort of way, this is correct. But in a more meaningful way, The Deep Dark is sweeping and of a historical breadth, that is at once breathlessly engrossing and terrifyingly patient.
Turi’s tale follows a young Moroccan man, Amir (Amir El Kacem), who, desperate for a job, volunteers to become a miner in France. Accepted for his fluency in French, Amir is assigned to join a group of very skilled miners working a treacherous mine in the north of Paris. One day, they are forced to make the descent into the mines with a professor, Berthier (Jean-Hugues Anglade), hired by an unknown but powerful and hungry party, who is on assignment to collect samples and take photographs from deep within the mine. Promised a bonus, the group begrudgingly comply to shepherd the ill-equipped professor, unaware of the latter’s goals, and the intricacies of his mission. Within an unexplored arm of the sprawling mine, the professor discovers a crypt and hieroglyphics from an early civilization, images that tell the tale of a vengeful, selfish, and ravenous god that, because it was impossible to please, the civilization lived in deference to. When a landslide occurs, the group is trapped, and, as they slowly discover, the god might not be just a mythical allegory.
Turi directs his own script within which he’s woven a sharp class consciousness — the specter of powerful and monied bodies controlling and endangering the lives of working class people looms heavily throughout the film — along with a mischievous understanding of the ways in which societies work when all hell breaks loose. Armed with this keen socio-political understanding, Turi is able to tease out a tale of epic proportions within a dark and confined space, a tale that is essentially human, for better or for worse.
The Deep Dark works as a horror because it makes deft use of light and shadow, turning the latter into velvety depths that it mines for suspense and terror. The film doesn’t hinge on gimmicky jump scares; rather, it prefers a gaze that is keenly aware of the ways in which our eyes work within dark, cloistered spaces, how they rove and grasp within meager light, unwittingly and only accidentally landing upon the wicked and damned, which, in turn, reveal themselves gradually, with the same meter that the eye takes to adjust to darkness. Here, the horrors that the miners unearth aren’t so much thrust at us as they are seen to awaken, and terror isn’t caked on so much as it is allowed to settle like some great weight, or like pressure, perhaps doom, slowly settling on one’s chest.
El Kacem portrays Amir with graceful dignity as he carries awareness of the young man’s past and his racialized identity into every one of his scenes with his white colleagues. As the film slinks along, we learn of Amir’s intelligence, which he wasn’t allowed to let flourish due to the French occupation of Morocco; as things get dire in the mine, he gradually emerges as the unlikely hero, but this turn doesn’t seem gimmicky or trite in the plot, due simply to El Kacem’s charming portrayal of a uniquely nuanced protagonist: young man caught in dire straits, doing what he can to survive in the face of forces that don’t care whether he lives or dies. Professor Berthier, meanwhile, is a grating personification not only of colonialism’s thievery, but also of its self-serving ethos that sees working class people as disposable in its pursuits; he keeps secrets that endanger the group he so relies on for his own survival, and when their professional caution threatens his goals, he endangers their lives, in the way ruling powers so often do with those they oppress.
While there are certainly a couple of miners whose foolhardiness endangers the others (Louis [Thomas Solivérès] and Polo [Marc Riso] secretly steal some artifacts so that they might sell them, an act that awakens the monster that haunts the group), it’s tough to hate them to the extent we hate the rich and soot-free face of Berthier. Turi shows us that Louis and Polo are nothing at all like Berthier for they perform a bad act so as to have a better chance of surviving the world’s cruelties. Each cast member portrays their character with a nuanced understanding of his socio-political place in the world, and the motivations that this position might inspire. Every actor delivers a superb performance, their portrayals pitch-perfect and lived in. And it is for this reason that Turi’s film is an intelligent success.
With its subtle, gradual, and compelling horror, The Deep Dark is a narrative achievement for the way in which it allows its story, its characters, its complex soul, to be supported by its visual vocabulary, not the other way around. It’s impossible not to fall in love with Amir, or not to want the lofty and stuffy professor or his rich amorphous bosses to meet a nasty end. It’s impossible not to simultaneously love and fear the mine that Amir and his colleagues work — love it for the ways in which it allows Amir to make a living, for its constancy and relative predictability that Amir and his team grow to feel comfortable and confident in; and fear for the horrors that the professor unearths. It’s impossible not to get invested in the tale’s beating heart. Turi’s script is robust and smart, expertly contextualized and carefully populated with characters that are in turn prickly and aching, trembling under the weight of a society that wants to violently rip all the earth’s secrets from her trembling grasp.
The Deep Dark takes us back to a kind of old school horror that we lost somewhere along the way, when we started making films with a capitalistic mindset, with the belief that the viewer should get a bang for their buck, get the living hell scared out of them even if this jeopardized narrative integrity. The Deep Dark, with its deep shadows, a monster that, much like the ruling class, eats those who work in its service, and jaw-droppingly raw performances, works because it is confident, and therefore charming and unforgettable.
