The North of France, 1956. Amir gets off the bus from Morocco with a single ticket to “the Devil’s Island”, the most infamous of all Northern-French mines due to its working conditions being far below zero. Nine hundred thirty meters below zero to be exact. Professor Beurthier wants to go even deeper, as he’d like to get down in the underground to take samples for a secret exploration. But it has to be at least 1000 meters below the surface with a personal escort of experienced miners. And the company he works for is willing to pay them handsomely. One week and several kilos of dynamite later, our prim and proper professor is standing shoulder to shoulder with the rough men led by war veteran Roland. Among them the slightly less rough Amir, who replaces a man who just had his leg shattered by a rock… The elevator takes them down to the deepest gallery of the mine. But what they stumble upon there has been slumbering in the bowels of the earth for centuries and it isn’t exactly pleased their nap was disturbed…
As if the reality of miners in the 50’s wasn’t sordid enough already, Mathieu Turi – whose MEANDER already had us gasping for air at the BIFFF 2021 – lets his men literally descend into hell. The social reality of the day gradually slides into Lovecraftian depths, or put differently, Emile Zola wrapped up in John Carpenter’s THE THING! The ghost of American genre cinema past, especially 70’s and 80’s, looms large in these French mine shafts, ‘cause what you see is what you get: almost exclusively real practical effects in an actual mine with the actors actually feeling oppressed by the all-encompassing darkness. And we bet you will as well!