Green Room meets The Descent in this French horror flick about 3 friends (Sofia Lesaffre, Victor Meutelet and Kassim Meesters) celebrating their last day in Paris by venturing into the Catacombs. They should have called it Tourist Trap.

The Catacombs are home to the remains of over six million people, whom you can visit on daily guided tours beneath the streets of Paris. Instead, the group decides to accompany a random stranger (Joseph Olivennes, son of Kristin Scott Thomas) whose hobbies include potholing and pot dealing. What could possibly go wrong?

Fortunately this 2022 thriller is aware of its ridiculousness, and meets the B movie material with a fun comic book tone. It mines the speleological and the illogical for no-frills thrills, making for an entertaining 80 minutes. Set in 1991, it has some nice nods to graffiti and hip-hop culture, although these elements are sadly underused.

The characters are also underdeveloped, and though their identities have political implications for the story (one of them is a soldier, another a half-Algerian woman), their relationships are never explored in the way that elevated The Descent. You never really get to the bottom of who they are or why they embarked on this subterranean expedition in the first place.

Despite being filmed in Belgium, Deep Fear does manage to capture the mysterious allure of the Paris Catacombs; ethereally cavernous one moment, queasily claustrophobic the next. The film throws everything against its walls to see what sticks: rats, traps and Nazisploitation.

But underneath all the spelunking bunkum, the movie is really confronting France’s history of Nazi collaboration and colonialism. And not just France; it is a film about the Nazism that lurks in wait beneath our feet. In no uncertain terms, Deep Fear says you can bury your heads in the sand, but there is no burying the past.