For a film taking place seven miles deep inside of the Earth’s crust, Russian director Arseny Syuhin’s Superdeep is surprisingly shallow. Set in 1984, the plot unfolds around a small Soviet research team sent to investigate suspicious activity recorded in the Kola Superdeep Borehole—the deepest man-made hole on Earth—and unknowingly unearth a violent biological threat to mankind in the process. While the period setting and promise of grotesque creatures should call for a strong aesthetic and an interesting analysis of Soviet-era scientific exploits, the final product is massively disjointed and astonishingly disinterested in imparting anything of value at all.
Though an eclectic team of scientists, mercenaries and military officials are elected to venture underground, the narrative is entirely tethered to the experience of Anna (Milena Radulovic), a seasoned researcher who had her last project go belly-up—taking a participant’s life along with it. The events that transpire within the seemingly abandoned subterranean research lab begin to mirror Anna’s past failed experiments—with the added exasperation of a heightened body count and a toxic substance oozing out of the victim’s rapidly decaying bodies. It quickly becomes clear that the infernal heat radiating from the Earth’s core fosters the perfect environment for a fungal species hell-bent on collecting biological victims to convert into spore-covered hosts.
If Superdeep has one thing in its favor, it’s that the stark similarities of plot it shares with John Carpenter’s The Thing are never brought to the viewer’s attention. Yet this is only because it is executed in such a convoluted fashion that much more time is spent thinking about what exactly is occurring on-screen as opposed to what references the film might be making. The plethora of characters whose names and personalities are all but abandoned in order to center Anna (who herself hardly says anything, opting instead to run around cluelessly, somehow still stumbling into solutions at every turn) comes across as careless and half-baked. The use of practical effects toward the back-end of the film come somewhat close to aptly appropriating an ‘80s horror aesthetic (as well as a killer sweater and Converse combo donned by Anna), yet even these moments can’t sufficiently perk up a punishingly stiff two hours.