Movie Review: The Deep House (2021)

Synopsis: Ben travels to exotic, reportedly haunted, locations with his girlfriend, Tina, in the hopes his videos will go viral and earn him enough money to marry her. He convinces a reluctant Tina to scuba dive and explore a house submerged in a man-made lake. However, when they enter the abandoned property, they discover two bodies in the basement and realize they are trapped inside.

Who's in it? The movie stars Camille Rowe, James Jagger, Eric Savin, Alexis Servaes and Carolina Massey.

Review: Even though my wife was content watching television re-runs after getting home from my daughter's college orientation, I was in the mood for a movie and convinced her to watch this film with me. Unfortunately, as has been the case with too many thrillers lately, the film wasn't as good as I had hoped it would be.

I'll start out by saying it wasn't all bad. The premise was reasonably believable, and I did find I liked the underwater setting because it gave the entire movie a bit of a claustrophobic feel to it, even when there wasn't anything notable happening. In other words, the fact they could run out of oxygen and die even without running into anything that was necessarily bad did add a little something extra to it.

I also found I liked the way Tina (Rowe) was portrayed in the movie. She was likable, seemed to have a good head on her shoulders, and her only real shortcoming was she seemed a little too willing to go out of her way to make her boyfriend (Jagger) happy, even though he did very little to show why she loved him.

While there were things I liked about the movie, the overall execution of the film did leave a lot to be desired. For one, a lot of the scenes are dragged out more than they need to be and, as a result of this, some of the more intense moments kind of lost something. Not to mention, it was hard to take their oxygen concern seriously when they seemed to have all the time in the world before they began to worry about it.

Plus, while I did like the idea of a movie taking place underwater, the way it was filmed did make difficult to fully see what was happening at times. If anything, some of the scenes were more likely to cause motion sickness than make me scared.

My wife and I also weren't thrilled about the way the movie ended. It felt a bit like the writers couldn't come up with a decent ending so just went with something that provided zero closure and no real explanation about what happened to the couple while they were in the house. To tell you the truth, I was on the fence a bit prior to the ending and probably would have enjoyed the film more had it concluded differently. The weak finale ended that chance.

Final Opinion: Good premise and a solid performance by Rowe but, overall, the film did lack something, and I didn't enjoy it as much as I hoped I would.

My Grade: C