1956, northern France. A gang of underground miners (Samuel Le Bihan, Amir El Kacem, Thomas Solivéres, Bruno Sanches, Marc Riso, Diego Martín) are forced to take a professor (Jean-Hugues Anglade) to take samples a thousand meters underground. After a landslide prevents them from going back up, they discover a crypt from another time, and unwittingly awaken something that should have remained dormant.
With Gueules Noires, his third feature film, Mathieu Turi takes on genre cinema once again, with a film shot, for the first time, exclusively in French. But while Gueules Noires is reminiscent in some respects of the Starfix years and its galaxy of new-genre directors, the film suffers from the same pitfalls that plagued it back then - a thin script that's hard to get into, characters with caricatured traits (the racist is very, very racist, as you'd expect), and a fake creature that would be more at home in front of an American house on Halloween than at the bottom of a mine.
By choosing not to choose, Mathieu Turi loses himself in the genres he claims to tackle, tilting his work sometimes towards the fantastic, sometimes towards horror, at times towards adventure films, without ever reaching his desire for anguish or terror.
The first hour seemed to be off to a good start, with this documented descent into the mining trade in northern France. An opening that resembled Germinal, all chiaroscuro. The sweat, noise and dust of the underground, the grease of the coal, the statues of Saint Barbara scattered around the gutters with the names of chicks, the telephone that you wind by hand to call the surface and the rats, as useful to the miners to warn them of cave-ins as they are to the system that physically breaks them.
But as soon as the tomb opens, the film veers towards horror and fantasy, and it's so laborious that even the headlamp lighting of the poor unfortunates in the background doesn't inspire a shiver of terror - it's not The Descent. This is due to the weakness and platitude of the characters' dialogues, alternating between questionable decisions and epiphanies of intelligence out of Indiana Jones' hat, such as the almost childlike deciphering of ancient runes that would make Champollion envious.
If the idea of a horror film set deep in a mine was out of the ordinary and could have foreshadowed a true genre film, and even though French cinema has been unveiling accomplished works for a handful of years(Titane, more recently Le Règne Animal or Vincent doit mourir), Gueules Noires remains only on the surface, snug and warm with white-collar workers.
Released in cinemas on November 15, 2023.
