Sound from the Deep

Although the poster claims that Sound from the Deep is inspired by the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, it is so ingrained with the minutia of his style that this 2017 short film feels like an extension of the maestro himself. In a mere 30 minute runtime, the writing and directing team of Joonas Allonen and Antti Laakso establish a dark and brooding world saturated with remnants of the Great Old Ones, only to leave our sole narrator a psychological mess.

An international research group is searching for natural resources from the Arctic Ocean. As they are about to end the voyage empty-handed, a strange underwater sound is heard from far north. Thinking it might be natural gas, they start their journey to the uncharted areas. As they get closer, they begin to understand the true nature of the sound.

The film's plot seems vaguely familiar, but Allonen and Laakso manage to capture the nitty-gritty of what makes a tale Lovecraftian and executes it perfectly. The result is the first truly horrifying and mind-bending attempt at Lovecraftian storytelling in years. The continual sense of impending doom is nailed perfectly by the strong performances from Eero Ojala, Lasse Fagerström, Anastasia Trizna, Mikael Andersson, and Fabian Silén, while Ville Muurinen's cinematography is supported by a frozen, watery wasteland and the cold, sterile interior of an exploration vessel. The production is as enormous as the threats that lurk in the icy depths of the ocean.

Joonas Allonen and Antti Laakso and the team at Twisted Films have delivered a shocking and terrifying short film that also manages to be wonderfully mesmerizing. Hopefully, once Sound from the Deep ends its award-winning festival run, audiences everywhere will get a chance to see and own this fantastic piece of cinema.

Making of great movie is hard thing to a accomplish. The process of creating one manage that requires time, money and skill and an ability to make sacrifices in one aspect to benefit the whole whilst also managing the budget and the limited time you have to film paid actors is a taunting task. Often an impossible one and results in product that was not quite what the director envisioned due to too many restraints.

Not without merit, the writing and directing due of Joonas Allonen and Antti Laakso manage to create a fantastic setting and a premise for their H.P. Lovecraft inspired story that is respectful to the source of it's inspiration, going as far as adapting some of the wording in actors lines. Whether that was a smart move, remains another topic. Set in the arctic ocean 'Sound from the Deep' is a homage to "Call of Cthulhu" with aspects of other stories of Lovecraft written in. The elements displayed along with brief moments of being a proper story brings me hope that it was only the lack of of resources that shrunk this movie to it's length and quality and not the lack of talent, effort or passion of the writers and directors.

Unfortunately, the great ideas and glimmers of ingenious choices are washed away with many a cinematic sin, from pacing, editing, framing and inefficient use of lighting. The story itself rushes a good premise of an building paranoia and distrust while solving a mystery to a uninteresting jog through set pieces with little room for atmosphere or time to develop characters or events. The arctics deep dark nights and brighter than bright days aren't utilized for contrast although surely a great deal of eerie atmosphere could be pulled from the setting. The sound design is horrendous despite being in the title and subject of the movie, it is unimaginative and doesn't equally understand how to pull the audiences strings. Take for example the glorious sounds of the hull warping under the pressure of 'Das Boot', or the eerie creaking ever present on board the 'The Terror', how simple sounds create the backdrop of discomfort to scenes and you know this film desperately needed just that. Acting in this movie is probably worst things around: everybody is struggling with their thicker than stone accents parred with clunky dialogue that no human would speak with minimal acting skills or room to develop, It's hard to say what is intentional here, or if these people can act beyond dialogue reading but it doesn't serve the overall flow.

Overall, this isn't a real short film as much as it isn't a real film: It's student work, a proof of concept that pretends its a real short film. And quite honestly, for the parts I enjoyed: Being very Lovecraft, paranoia plot in a small ship, the waking up sequence, and how they used their cheap but appropriate effects, I do hope it gets picked up to be reworked into a full feature film with more talented and experience cast, production crew and others to guide it through. But as it is now, I can only recommend it for people to see out of curiosity.

This is a very generous 4/10, I really don't have too many good things to say about this Lovecraftian short film. The landscape shots and special effects looked great and Sofia's actor did good.

I really wanted to like the movie but I can't overlook the clunky acting, nonexistent thrills and bad sound mixing and a cheesy ending. I wished for a more psychological approach instead of this.

When they first hear the sound it gets messed with the soundtrack and overall it sounds a bit bad, it would've been a lot more scary if they'd cut off the background music. A man shouting in a room sounds more like he's in a different room, again, because the soundtrack gets too loud there.

Scenes at the table look very bad, the camera angles were really distracting and the actors seemed bored. Some of the lines (it's gas, what else could make that sound) are terrible.

I didn't like the lead actor at all. He looks like he wasn't really cast and he somehow accidentally got caught in the filming process and he didn't want to say anything. His character felt nothing more than a prop reacting to stuff around him. It really didn't feel like he was going crazy at all, just frowning and saying lines in front of a camera.