-2023-2023 | The Tank

The Descent , The Host , Sweetheart , and anyone who’s ever heard a drip in the basement and decided not to investigate.

★★★½ (out of 5) Watch if you dare: With the lights off and the volume up—preferably not in a house with a crawlspace. The Tank -2023-2023

Sound design plays an equally crucial role. Dripping pipes. The rumble of the water heater. And below it all, a slow, rhythmic thump-thump —something large moving through submerged concrete corridors. By the time the creatures fully appear, the audience has already been submerged in their world for forty minutes. Beneath the teeth and slime, The Tank offers a quietly resonant subtext. The tank itself is a man-made structure—a relic of a previous owner’s dark solution to an inconvenient problem. The film asks: What do we bury to protect our future? And what happens when the past refuses to stay buried? The Descent , The Host , Sweetheart ,

Walker, a veteran visual effects artist (credits include The Hobbit trilogy), deliberately chose practical suits and animatronics. The result is a monster that feels tactile. When a creature’s claw drags across a concrete wall, you hear the scrape. When it surfaces from murky water, it leaves a film of organic residue. This isn’t a sleek Hollywood mutant; it’s a believable, horrifying evolutionary throwback—perhaps a relic from a warmer, wetter epoch, sealed away by the home’s original owner. The film’s real antagonist, however, is the setting. Walker shoots the Oregon coast as a character itself: fog-soaked mornings, relentless rain, and the groaning of an old house settling. The cinematography by Simon Riera keeps the camera low and tight, mimicking the confined crawlspaces and flooded sumps the family must navigate. Dripping pipes

Released quietly in April 2023, Scott Walker’s independent horror film bypassed the multiplex for VOD and select theaters—but for those who found it, The Tank became an unexpected gem. It’s a film that asks a deceptively simple question: What if the monster under the bed was actually under the floorboards? The plot is lean and mean. Ben (Luciane Buchanan’s real-life partner, Matt Whelan) inherits a remote, crumbling coastal property in Oregon after his estranged mother’s death. Along with his wife, Jules (Buchanan), and their young daughter, they hope to restore it—a classic “fixer-upper” dream. But the house comes with baggage: a sealed, flooded basement and a cryptic deed restriction prohibiting any excavation of the land.