Movie Review: The Deeper You Dig

The Deeper You Dig *** ½ / *****
Directed by: John Adams and Toby Poser.
Written by: John Adams and Toby Poser.
Starring: John Adams (Kurt), Toby Poser (Ivy), Zelda Adams (Echo), Shawn Wilson (Dell), Joan Poser (Mrs. Minskey). 

The Deeper You Dig is further proof, if any was needed, that you really don’t need all that much to make an effective horror movie. This movie is quite literally a family affair – written and directed by John Adams and Toby Poser, a married couple, that pair also star in the film, alongside their teenage daughter Zelda Adams – who gets a co-director credit here. And there is very little here that would require the family to spend all that much money. This is more of a mood piece that anything else – and that mood is foreboding and dread – set in a small, snow-bound, rural environment. Things build here, rather slowly admittedly, but the atmosphere is right – and the film builds to where it needs to go.

The movie is essentially the three characters played by the family crashing into each other. Kurt (John Adams) lives alone, and one night after too many drinks, is driving down an isolated, snowy road, swerves to miss a dear – and hits something else instead. That turns out to be Echo (Zelda Adams) – who is killed. Kurt buries the body, but he certainly feels guilt over what he has done. Echo’s mother is Ivy (Toby Poser), a psychic who has lost her gift, and is basically just conning people now. But this brings those powers back – and Ivy starts to have some horrifying dreams, that inconveniently, don’t spell out everything she needs to know. She meets Kurt while canvassing for anyone who may have seen Echo, and they become friends of a sort – Kurt obviously feels too bad to tell Ivy what really happened. Echo isn’t just coming to her mother in dreams though – she’s coming to Kurt as well, haunting him, mocking him – and the more he tries to get rid of her, the deeper she sinks her claws into her. She is dead – but she’s not gone.

The story is not an overly original one – although it certainly does take any number of strange twists and turns as it moves along, and you’re never quite sure where it’s going. The performances are all effective as well – I don’t think anyone is winning any Oscars any time soon here, but their performances are impressive in their own way – in body language, and long pauses more than anything. The real treat though is the direction – as the Adams’ family revel in shots that effectively creep you out. Their sense of place is excellent – the snowbound horror movie has always been effective from The Shining to The Thing to the recent The Lodge – and here, on almost no money, they get that overwhelming weight of it all just right. You can sense that the family is reveling in these shots.

The Deeper You Dig is more of an effective mode piece that truly scary – it is about guilt, of course, and the title takes on a few different meanings – a literal one, and some not so literal. It is creepily effective at what it does. Horror filmmakers with 10 times the budget, don’t have the sense of place and the ability to create atmosphere as what is shown here.