Found footage has a supply problem. There are only so many camcorders left in the woods, only so many hard drives pulled out of a crime scene, and horror fans learned the rhythm of that setup a long time ago. The Depths gets around the shortage by asking something the format has mostly left alone. What if the camera could leave your body and keep recording? Writer and director Tristan Reed puts a brother and sister at the center of it. They get good at astral projection, they film what happens, and the footage they bring back has more to do with the house they grew up in than with anything waiting out in the dark. Eric Roberts turns up. Eric Roberts always turns up, and I mean that warmly.
The camera finally gets to leave the room
Two rules hold found footage together. Somebody has to be holding the camera, and that somebody has to stay in the building while things get worse. We have heard every excuse for both. Battery life. Documentary deadline. The insurance company needs it on record. Astral projection walks around the problem instead of arguing with it. Perspective stays subjective and stays limited, which is the engine of the format, but the body stops being an anchor. A locked door turns into a suggestion.
In press materials for the film, Reed described his first feature as a mix of “atmospheric POV terror and wacky slasher tropes, with a hint of modern analog horror.” That is unreasonable luggage for one 88 minute movie to carry, and most of it makes the trip. When The Depths is running on its central idea it feels like a format being handed a new verb, and Reed shoots those stretches like he knows exactly what he has.
The family material is why the rest holds. The trauma is not a late reveal bolted on to explain the monster, and Isabella Bonanno and Ryan Yauger have to sell a sibling relationship while also selling the physical experience of leaving a body. There is real imagination in the imagery once things start going wrong, too. Not shock, exactly. More the specific discomfort of watching something that should not be able to see you.
Then it puts the camera down
The ideas are not the problem. The distance between them is. The film builds momentum and then idles, circling back to information already delivered, landing a projection sequence at roughly the intensity of the one before it. Found footage runs on dead air, but dead air only works when the audience believes something is being withheld. That hurts more here because the premise makes a promise. Each trip out should be worse than the last. Eighty eight minutes is nothing, and stretches of this felt longer than movies twice the length.
Design is the other drag. Found footage asks for one act of trust, which is that this was captured rather than built, and everything inside the frame counts as evidence, wardrobe included. A few costume choices here read as decisions rather than as things that exist in a room, and attention slides off the horror and onto the seam. This is not a budget complaint. Some of the most unnerving found footage ever shot was made for nothing, because the cheapest resource in the format is restraint. Keep it partial, keep it moving, keep it half glimpsed.
Then the slasher takes the wheel. Reed said that influence was part of the plan, so nobody was baited, and I like slashers. The frustration is the exchange rate, because the supernatural concept has a stranger, meaner film inside it than the chase material that eventually takes over. The viewers who have weighed in landed near the same place, warm on the premise and cooler once the running starts, though coverage is thin enough that I would not call that a consensus. The kill material is competent. The astral material is inspired. Competent is a demotion.
Terror Films Releasing brings The Depths to streaming on September 18, including Tubi, Chilling, The Roku Channel and Fandango at Home, with additional platforms also planned. Luna Verdict: stream it. Worth seeking out if you watch found footage seriously or if you like a supernatural premise that is not just another cursed tape. The pacing sags and a few design choices break the spell, so it is not essential. Reed found a door in a room everyone assumed was fully measured. I want to watch him go through it faster.
