DEEP TROUBLES

The Chinese Room drills into a rich vein of '70s horror in terrifying firstperson chiller Still Wakes The Deep

- CHRIS SCHILLING

Caz McLeary ran away to sea to escape his problems. As this working-class ex-boxer from Glasgow chats with a colleague in the canteen of the Beira D, an oil rig in the North Sea just off the coast of Scotland, the nature of those problems soon becomes clear. His wife, Suze, is talking about divorce. She’ll come around, his workmate says. Not likely, McLeary responds, “if I get the jail”. His crime? Assaulting a man who insulted her. “Remember,” his friend begins, “life is like football. It’s not over…” McLeary finishes the sentence: “…until the final whistle, aye. But you’re a Barnsley fan, so you’re pretty much fucked from the off.”

Hours later, he’s running to escape a very different kind of problem, the possibility of prison now the least of his worries. The rig, we’re told, as our demonstration skips forward a few chapters, has drilled into “something”. For a good while, you won’t know exactly what that something is, but you’ll begin to see its effects, on both the rig and the crew themselves. At the controls, QA tester Tom Grant guides McLeary to duck under a gantry, grabbing a bottle to throw and distract whatever is pursuing him. A series of loud metallic thuds follows, and Grant emerges from his hiding place. As it turns out, he’s moved a little too soon: from the cacophonous noise (nigh indescribable even if we hadn’t been asked not to reveal the precise nature of the threat), it’s clear he’s been spotted. The sound only gets louder and closer as he sprints up a set of steps, just about making it to an open hatch – narrow enough to accommodate a human but nothing larger – before dropping down.