After bursting onto the scene with the French New Extremity shocker Inside, writers/directors Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury have had a career full of ups and downs. But one thing they’re well-versed in is creating tension and set pieces. The Deep House is their second film released this year in the States and while it doesn’t reinvent the found footage wheel, it adds new dimensions to it by setting most of the film in a claustrophobic house...underwater.

Ben (James Jagger) and Tina (Camille Rowe) are a couple who film YouTube videos of themselves climbing through creepy and abandoned urban buildings. The Deep House opens with one such expedition in a dilapidated hospital in the Ukraine where, it’s said, a nurse poisoned seven children before taking her own life. Ben then adds a traditional “and she still haunts the halls!” to the narrative, as his camera picks up the desolate location.

“Fuck ghosts, right?” Tina responds.

Fuck ghosts, indeed. Because after this expedition, they will soon get more ghostly experiences than either planned on. head to a small town in France where a town was once flooded and now sits, nestled at the bottom of a lake. Unfortunately, when they arrive, Ben and Tina discover that the lake has been turned into a tourist spot. Luckily, they meet a man who can take them to a spot, deep in the woods, where a lone house stands submerged in the water. It’s a place no one knows about and Ben, desperate to get those YouTube views, decides they need to go investigate it.

Unlike more traditional found footage films, Alexandre and Julien play with the subgenre’s tropes. The Deep House utilizes some moments of traditional cinematography in the beginning of the film, from a scene of Tina attempting to hold her breath in the bathtub to wide open, aerial shots of the woods as they drive towards the lake. Peppered throughout this are shots from their cameras, but it feels like a more traditional film with traditional cinematography. It’s a smart decision and cinematographer Jacques Ballard uses it to full effect so that when the couple enter the murky lake, the view becomes stifled. Once they’ve donned their scuba gear, the tone changes abruptly, even though they have a drone (nicknamed Tom) that captures more wide, cinematic shots.

The set design is immaculate and The Deep House uses environmental storytelling to do a lot of the heavy-lifting in the early parts. The lack of fish as they near the creepy mansion, for instance. Or the fact that the house has been shuttered and sealed up. Inside the house, paintings showcase the stern and harsh family and one of the rooms has pictures of children pushed onto antlers placed on the wall. Most of the first half of the film tackles their slow exploration of the house, annotating weird anomalies and building a slow-building sense of dread. It’s when they find the kitchen and the giant, Jesus-clad crucifix barring a door that the supernatural element becomes more pronounced.

I have a feeling the story behind making The Deep House is more interesting that the narrative playing out on screen. In interviews, the directors mention that the house was built on large grids that were plunged underwater and it gives the film a, pardon the unintentional pun, haunting look on film. One particular scene is bathed in an eerie green glow through the windows, drenching the house in an underwater take on Gothic atmosphere. With the ghosts played by flesh and blood actors, they sort of languidly float through the water towards the pair. In some sequences, this adds an implacable and disconcertingly unnatural edge to the ghosts and amps up the fear. In others, they look like actors trying very hard to move through the water. It also utilizes standard spook-out moments, to the point where discerning viewers could probably lay out the story beats long before they happen. But considering the difficulty of the shoot and the immense amount of planning it must have taken to pull this movie off deserves some accolades.

The Deep House doesn’t completely work, but when it does it reminds the audience why Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury are held in such esteem.