Superdeep (2020)

 A frustrating missed opportunity to do something awesome.

There are some tropes that never get old, in my humble opinion.  One of the oldest, most over-used yet evergreen is the one about the squad of tough-as-nails  (or, less often smart-as-fuck scientists) who have to investigate a Terribly Mysterious Happening and discover Things Man Was Not Meant To Know that eats their faces before the Plucky Final Guy / Girl blows it up or flushes it into space or whatever.  Love it.  Any film like that is almost guaranteed a sympathetic viewing - and (weirdly) the closer they stick to the template the better they mostly are.  Mostly.

Milena Radulović spends almost the entire film looking various sorts of bad ass.

Which is what makes Superdeep disappointing.  In theory, it should be among the greatest of such films - it is essentially The Thing and Aliens and a bunch of lesser genre examples (Leviathan, Ghost Ship, Event Horizon) stuck into a blender and the resultant icky goo poured down a Soviet mineshaft.  But it doesn't work.

The setting should have been enough.  A stupidly deep (12 kilometres down) hole in the ground in the frozen wastes of the Soviet Union?  And the scariest thing is, it isn't entirely made up - there really is a stupidly deep hole in the ground in the wastes of the (former) Soviet Union.  Though since it was only 23cm wide you might need to add Anaconda to the mix of horror films.

Sensibly, the director decides to ignore the aesthetic restrictions a 23cm filmable area would impose ("Dude, why are we filming this in widescreen?") and creates a scientific research station deep beneath the surface, where unwise scientists encounter ... something dark and terrible, triggering another investigation combining both interchangeable tough-as-nails grunts and a smart-as-fuck scientist in the form of Milena Radulović who is riveting as the disgraced, guilt-ridden scentist Anya.  They are charged with to find out What Happened.

An interchangeable tough-as-nails grunt you may be, but with your shirt off you're very nice.

So far, so good.  But that is about as far as we get.  After almost two hours of running time, we're pretty much at a loss to explain what was found at the bottom of the hole.  It's something to do with mould.  Which doesn't like the cold - the perma-frost has kept it sealed down there, but now human activity is offering it an escape route.

(The root of the idea for this film would appear to be valid sciencey type concerns that climate change may release ancient viruses trapped in the perma-frost.  So, you know, the whole thing is a metaphor.  Or a symbol.  Or an allegory.  Or something.)

But beyond this promising set up, the film rapidly stops making sense.  Why is the team greeted by a deranged scientist with a hand grenade?  Is he trying to stop them getting in?  Or destroy himself?  Either way, there would appear to be more sensible ways of going about it.  Why are the walls of the complex defaced with portentous graffiti?  Surely these would all be painted over on the orders of any Commissar worth his or her salt?  The scratchings are clearly meant to create sense of foreboding.  But if the terrible nature of What Lies Beneath is known to the workers, it seems strange they have decided to communicate their concerns through petty vandalism, rather than blowing up the complex.  Only one of the original team of scientists seems to have given any thought to actually destroying the menace (though the scratchings suggest many perceive its malevolence) and even he seems to go about trying to seal it off in a needlessly complex way.

Obviously, you have to accept some contrivance in setting up these scenarios - why the Hell didn't anyone on Hadley's Hope bother to send an email to Weyland-Yutani or any other authority, mentioning how they'd discovered some sort of weird xenomorph that was hanging off someone's face? - but the scratchings in Superdeep seem egregious as they are deliberately picked out by the camera and  obviously there to make us feel unsettled.

(And, for that matter, would you build a ridiculously long elevator that descends and ascends at breakneck speed?  And contains an 'emergency protocol' that means it will plummet down the shaft to destruction if the wrong code is entered three times?)

The special effects are also only so-so.  There is a lot of icky-gooey stuff and some body-degeneration stuff that isn't quite up to the job.  And when the big nasty shambles rather unexpectedly onto screen in the final minutes we aren't given a good look at it - just glimpses of anguished faces and absorbed bits of people leering out of the shambling mound of mould spores or fungus or whatever it is.  To be honest, I wish they had shown us even less - there is a distinct whiff of them trying to get something on screen to gratify their audience but knowing what they've got isn't quite enough.  If you can't do the full The Thing sludge fest lunacy, the trick is to avoid showing anything at all.

Gross, but no cigar.

But anyway, all that aside, we get into a mine, and our team inevitably become trapped and there is Something Down There With Them.  This should be pretty cool - even more claustrophobic than Aliens or the Thing (at least there you could go outside) but it isn't.  We never really get a sense of being trapped - and even when we discover the whole complex is going to collapse in an hour (WHY?!) there isn't a palpable sense of urgency or despair.  No-one huddles in a corner with a bottle of vodka, weeps at the thought of never seeing their daughter again, or goes crazy and starts trying to shoot the Colonel "for getting us into this mess."  They just remain calm and carry on - a commendable testament to Soviet discipline and stoicism, but not very exciting cinema.

As they carry on, though, things only get worse.  We should be moving towards some big reveal, some moment where we discover the true purpose of the mineshaft or the scale of the threat to humanity or just how ghastly humans can be to each other.  But we don't get it.  Instead we get a few minutes on Anya on a walkway that stretches off into no-where with something pulsating ominously in the distance ... it's anti-climactic.  Even setting a weird monster made from bits of people congealed The Thing style into an unholy mess can't compensate for the sense of emptiness at the climax of the film.

Also, on a practical level, the dubbing makes this film a hard watch.  Some cast members deliver their lines in thick accents, others in more western tones.  Bizarrely, at one point, we hear Mikail Gorbachev addressing the nation in Russian while characters talk English.  It's ... disconcerting and jars us out of the story.

I'm not a fan of dubbing at the best of times and here it is done poorly.  There is a sequence - the afore mentioned scientist with a grenade moment - where the sound track is layered with voices calling out warnings, instructions and so on.  Lacking real emotion it sounds more like fake dialogue in a Playstation game than a real life critical situation.  It doesn't help that the performances are at best average - with the notable exception of Milena Radulović.

There are things to like.  Radulović is luminous on screen (though you can not quite buy her as an expert virologist, and more Denise Richards convinced as a nuclear physicist in The World Is Not Enough.  The film makers were obvious thinking about more than her intellectual credentials as well, as they find an excuse to strip her to her underwear for the final sequences.

There are, I am sure, good plot reasons for this malarkey

But casual sexism aside, she gives a performance which would, in any reasonable excuse for a film, be drawing comparison to Sigourney Weaver in Aliens.  But as Superdeep is at best barely adequate, she won't get the recognition she deserves, at least not until she's given a better vehicle for her talent.

And yet I do quite like this film, for all the flaws outline above.  As said, I am a sucker for this sort of stuff.  Hell, I even watched a terrible film called Abandoned Mine and I enjoyed it.  really enjoyed it, not in some sort of kitschy post-ironic clever cleaver sort of way.  People underground movies rock, man!

It is also worth observing, in a slightly patronising manner, that Superdeep was made on a budget that was even lower than the bottom of the very deep hole they are stuck in.  So we should acknowledge that the director, producers and crew did a sterling job just getting anything half-watchable onto screen.  And he has some good visual ideas, framing shots, with an acute eye for the strange little cosmos he has created for his characters.

Sexy Soviet Chic, circa 1984

One suspects - given the film will surely recoup its modest outlay - director Arseniy Sukhin will be given another gig, though he might want to spend a bit more time developing the story for his next project.

And, in the final of final analyses, I don't give a stuff that I don't know what they hell was pulsating redly at the end of that walkway deep in the bowels of the Earth.  They're called Things Man Was Not Meant To Know for a reason, and I'm cool with that.

Star Rating: **