FrightFest Glasgow review – Geueles Noires (The Deep Dark)

My notes on Geueles Noires (The Deep Dark)

Writer-director Mathieu Turi is a specialist in claustrophobia (and likes proper monsters) … in Meander, the heroine is locked into a booby-trapped labyrinth … in Hostile, a woman is trapped in her overturned van by a zombie.  Here, he puts a group of sweaty men in a deep dark hole and has them play deadly tag with a superbly-designed creature.  It’s yet another spin on H.P. Lovecraft, with some Cthulhu mythos needle-drops, and an interesting, possibly exciting new approach to the Necronomicon – HPL ascribed his book of lore to ‘a mad Arab’ but few have looked at it from a North African point of view, and there’s a fillip here as a highly-qualified French archaologist misses a clue spotted by a Moroccan miner because he’s forgotten the script should read from right to left.

A 19^th century prologue establishes that something evil with needly fingers lives in a coal mine, then picks up the story in 1956 as Lovecraft-style scholar Berthier (Jean-Hugues Anglade, of Betty Blue) bribes a manager (Philippe Torreton) to let him have access to a lower level of a mine known as Devil’s Island because conditions are so dire.  Proletarian hero Roland (Samuel Le Bihan, from Brotherhood of the Wolf) is boss of a motley crew which includes newbie Amir (Amir El Kacem) and a group who cheerfully or angrily accept their stereotypes – a Spaniard (Diego Martin), an Italian (Bruno Sanches), a chubby glutton (Marc Riso) and an obnoxious asshole (Thomas Soliveres).  Blasting into a level sealed off since the prologue, the party discover ancient cave scrawlings and a sarcophagus – since mummy movies were probably banned in France in the 1950s, no one knows any better and the lid of the tomb is shoved aside, releasing one of the damnedest damned things you ever saw (Carl Laforet, of Pandemonium and Eight for Silver), which slightly conforms to genie rules by accepting the actual lid-lifter as its master but is mostly concerned with slaughtering the miners one by one and getting to the surface to renew an ancient reign of terror.

Gueles Noires – the title refers to a general expression for soot-faced miners – takes a while to get started, almost as if it were going to be an expose of horrible conditions in French coal mines in the 1950s, but goes into overdrive once the beast is loose – with imaginative, unpleasant and effective shock scenes, and some gritty male bonding as the last men standing resolve to do the right thing.  It perhaps lacks some of the emotional undertone of Turi’s female-focused films, but is a splendid, gloomy monster movie.

Here’s the FrightFest listing.