Film Review — "The Superdeep"

The Kola Superdeep Borehole is a real thing. It was a USSR scientific endeavor to drill as far down into the Earth’s crust as humanly possible for… Cold War reasons? In 1970, the drilling began. Nineteen years later, the Soviets reached approximately 7.6 miles beneath the surface, creating the deepest borehole in the world—a record that would not be broken for almost two decades. The project was stopped in 1992 because the closer the scientists got the Earth’s mantle, the higher the temperature got and drilling became unfeasible. That’s the official story anyway.

Arseny Syuhin’s film The Superdeep suggests that something more horrific occurred. In the fictional version of events, set in 1984, the military recruits an epidemiologist to visit a research station located thousands of meters underground so as to glean whatever scientific information she can for the Soviet government before other nations turn up. But they arrive down below only to find that a part of the facility has been welded off and just a fraction of the original crew remain. This is the part where all signs point to get the fuck out of there and get your comrade asses back up to the surface, but no. They stay and messy horror ensues.

The Superdeep tries to be everything all at once. It’s almost like Syuhin had a big boiling pot of genre pasta and then threw it all at a moldy wall and anything that stuck went into his movie. The plot is so beyond muddled that it’s borderline incoherent. On top of that, nearly all the characters are meat puppets with zero, ahem, depth. Even Anya, the epidemiologist protagonist, is pretty flat. Her backstory of recent failure—shot in a digital black and white that’s so crisp it’s sure to make at least one annoying cinephile cream their jockeys—does explains her coldness, but doesn’t excuse her dullness.

This whole thing feels very manufactured, including the wonky dialogue. Much of the lingo sounds as though it was written using the predictive text function on an iPhone. And other snippets probably read okay on the page, but play out in the phoniest way:

“I’ve always wanted to know what the difference is between a microbiologist and an epidemiologist.”

“Microbiologists study lifeforms…”

“And you?”

“I study how they die.”

First of all, it must be mentioned that the character who asks the above question is supposed to be smart. Now, I’m not trying to shame anyone who doesn’t know the difference between a microbiologist and an epidemiologist, unless you are a scientist—which that character is, I think, supposed to be? If you’re in STEM, you should know.

The words look fine, but the delivery is simply not there. I’m sure the lines—and this bit in particular—wouldn’t sound so… written if I’d heard them in Russian. Oh, because by the way, this movie as it’s presented on Shudder is inexplicably dubbed in English. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to fix my audio settings so I could watch this Russian horror film in Russian. But no. English is the only available language. The dubbing job is not the worst per se, but at certain points it is painfully obvious that the lips don’t exactly match. I’m not going to place the blame entirely on Shudder—maybe the studio intentionally dubbed the film in English, presuming that would make it more marketable? But hearing the film in it’s original tongue could’ve lent the movie at least a shred of authenticity.

Also adding to The Superdeep’s artificiality is how regularly the digital VFX supersede the practical SFX. The actual tangible stuff on screen is fantastic, but the layering in of computer-generated work undercuts it. Same goes for the art direction. When this underground laboratory and its surroundings aren’t being reinforced with shoddy CGI, it’s pretty cool—even though it makes no damn architectural sense. For starters, I find it difficult to believe that a facility this complex was built this far underground; hopefully the construction crew was unionized. I mean, this place has more twists and turns than the Overlook Hotel. The filmmakers did a great job erecting and decorating each individual nook. If only they had been designed to fit together somewhat believably…

The Superdeep is about as muddy as it is hollow. It’s almost impressive, how messy it is. This could have been a neat episode of an anthology series, had the script been whittled down to about half its current length and polished with the harshest of chemicals. Imagine Stuart Gordon directing it for Masters of Horror; just picture what he would have done with that creature of amalgamation, or whatever it is. Unfortunately, Arseny Syuhin is no Stuart Gordon. Syuhin definitely set out to make his version of The Thing, but it’s really more of a Sphere—only nowhere near as fun.