BUNKER 717 (aka Deep Fear) *** Belgium / France 2022 Dir: Grégory Beghin. 80 mins
I have said before that often in genres there are no new concepts. Reinventing the wheel is not necessary however healthy execution of ideas is. Director Grégory Beghin and writer Nicolas Tackian have fashioned a competent if not unremarkable horror picture called Bunker 717 (aka Deep Fear) (2022). Competent in that it has its moments bogged down by tropes we have seen before.
Firstly, taking a page out of all those cave or enclosure horror films like the now classic The Decent (2005), The Keep (1983) and others that take people into holes, cellars and other worlds. Bunker 717 (2022) pits young people against an unknown menace.
The picture opens in Paris in 1989 with a young graffiti artist tagging a wall deep below when he comes under a violent attack. The Director chooses the familiar-looking camera work of being chased and pulled back just before escape, so you get the idea of what to expect.
The film then segues to 1991, and Sonia (Sofia Lesaffre) is hoping to give her university mates Henry (Victor Meutelet) who is going for his compulsory military service and Max (Kassim Meesters) a weekend they won’t forget. They drink and do drugs and run afoul of some local skinheads. Sonia has drug and alcohol-induced vision of the skinheads invading her small apartment which is so small you can actually “Pee and make spaghetti at the same time.”
The following afternoon they meet Sonia’s dealer from the night before Ramy (Joseph Olivennes), who offers them the unique experience of going down to the Paris Catacombs to a special area known as The White Zone.
The story adds some subtle hints that where one is from is important besides the obvious skinhead philosophy you have Sonia, who is Franco-Algerian. The old hate die hard in this world which turns out to be the same below.
Ramy’s fellow cataphiles are introduced after trying to scare people away. You have Faust (Blaise Afonso), Dante (Olivier Bony) and Lamia (Léone François). It is a subculture of the young that explore the lawless world below with assumed names.
Ramy, Sonia and the others discover something they don’t want to find. In a small spoiler, it is the remains of a Nazi bunker below Paris that is still inhabited by a killing machine and its dog. The survival horror kicks in with some effective moments such as one of the cataphile girls who was looking for her brother who was the one at the film’s beginning. She walks out from behind a wall slowly to reveal that she has been basically gored, lost a limb and still gently saying that she has ‘found him’.
The subtext of racism lurking underneath the French capital ready to come out in force is a theme. Racism in general as the skinheads get a second appearance only to be stopped by a gun-toting Sonia who orders them to take off their jackets and Max to pee on them which he does after he asks the people to turn around. This led me to believe that this is more a film about inner monsters than supernatural ones however the gore is plentiful.
Bunker 717 (2022) will not shake your horror world, but it does boast some fine actors and some production values. The potential is there in the story, yet it didn’t go far enough. Was it the intention to draw the racism parallels lurking in many and put it on the horror film motif? Either way, it’s enjoyable in its own way. It’s rather telling that as I write this the academy awards for 2022 have passed and the German Director Edger Berger of the best film of the year the remake of All Quiet On The Western Front (2022) said ‘that what they had made was, in fact, a Horror film’.
Review by Terry Sherwood
BUNKER 717 (aka Deep Fear) is available on Amazon Prime Video in the UK and USA
Also available on DVD in the UK