‘The Deeper You Dig’ Review: Dirs. John Adams, Toby Poser [Frightfest 2019]

The Deeper You Dig review: Revenge is most definitely served cold in this chilling family caper.

It feels impossible not to wonder. Did this indomitable mother-father-daughter team produce a fabulous horror film because their literal bloodline invokes them to (they’re the Adams family, and this film an Adams family film – written, directed and starred in by all three) or is the situation merely one of those fateful not-quite-coincidences that the movie itself plays on so wittily?

Either way, this is a stunning home-grown accomplishment — almost unbelievable that Adams, Adams, and Poser could manifest a love letter to the genre that is both boldly experimental and sagely aware of tropes; most families can’t even get through a dinner without falling apart.

There’s something cathartic about The Deeper You Dig, even before it’s bloody finale. The personal, nepotistic context of its conception is not a hindrance, but rather feeds into the raw emotion of a gutting scenario: a daughter (Zelda Adams – child of the directors) takes her sled out and swiftly goes missing on a snowy school night. She is called Echo Allen. Echo, maybe because her presence – physically destroyed in the first act – takes on a lingering but evanescent quality throughout the narrative. In the wake of her vanishing and the dreadful, mistaken circumstances behind it, two strangers start to become more and more intertwined: one is reclusive neighbour Kurt (director-writer John Adams) who is trying to forget he ever saw Echo the night she went sledding, trying to bury the truth. The other is her mother, Ivy (director-writer Toby Poser) who is trying her best to dig the truth up — unearth those niggling, ugly answers that all parents of a missing child both long and dread to know.

This film is, among other things, about re-occurrence. Kurt is rebuilding his house, and sees the angry shape of Echo in the timbers and the filament between the walls, over and over. Meanwhile Ivy returns to her spirituality; once a real medium who ditched honest efforts to contact the spirit world and instead turned performer, hack and scammer-to-the-mourning — she starts to try and listen to the supernatural again (resulting in some of the film’s best sequences of Mike Flanagan-esque Gothic psychedelia, eye-ball rolling, throat-gouging et al). And spooky motifs — a blood-splattered deer, Echo’s favourite retro tune (she sings a few lines, once, and they stick to the soundtrack thereafter) and the instruction ‘Tell my mother what you’ve done’ — repeat themselves like double, triple, quadruple loops on one massive knot of anxiety.

It emulates, in places, Fargo, and not just because of the Coen-like family production. There’s an icy, snow-buried town and flashes of quirky, black humour, (Kurt is horrified when his preoccupation with Echo even leads him to take a feminine squat on the toilet instead of standing). The sparse, chilly beauty of the surrounding compliments the sparse beauty of the plot and three-character-only tale. And the small-town claustrophobia is played to perfection, where Ivy and Kurt — two opposing fractals of the same tragedy — circle each other, closer and closer, like snowflakes in the wind. She’s right on his tail, knocking on his door, striking up a terse familiarity, staring over his shoulder into his hallway, and into his car window from the gale-swept, roadside snowbank — all without herself, even, knowing precisely why (but the whispers she hears in her head do). There’s also a touch of Lovely Bones to proceedings: the emotive power of bonds beyond earthly paradigms. Like all the best ghost stories, The Deeper You Dig knows that the existence of unbelievable darkness also necessitates the possibility of light: our love remains, somewhere — our loved ones remain, somewhere.

Props to the Adams family for delivering top-notch acting performances (Toby Poser, in particular, is a standout as a mother unravelling at a glacial but unstoppable rate), as well as a script that is pretty subversive for all it’s merry-making in classic horror conventions (yes there is a jump scare, and yes, it works). The directing is assured — the camera held tight to the windshield of cars plowing through snowfall and nightfall, and faces lit like leering, luminescent pop-outs from darkness. But it’s the story this family chose to tell that is most impressive: a thoughtful exploration of just all the many ways that we are capable of possessing each other — through fear, and through love.

The Deeper You Dig was reviewed at Arrow Video Frightfest 2019.