If water pierces that shell, filling each space and rising room by room, it could be downright terrifying.

For his latest film, Oscar winner Edward Berger transports viewers to that world in a way previously unimaginable.

The All Quiet On The Western Front director wrote and directed Submerged, the first original scripted film shot in Apple Immersive Video, and meant to be viewed using the Apple Vision Pro mixed reality device.

“I think in this case, I saw the technology and I felt the urge to create a movie for it,” Berger said, adding that when he first saw footage filmed in Apple Immersive Video it “blew my mind.”

“I’d seen documentaries, we are fiction filmmakers,” he added. “We wanted to tell a story with this medium and see how far we can push it, see what barriers we can break, how much we can make you feel that you’re actually on this submarine. And I wanted to experience that, I wanted to take myself on the submarine.”

Berger says that he was inspired by submarine films like Das Boot, “but we haven’t seen it in a 180 environment, and to use that technology to heighten that tension even more, felt like a great challenge.”

A big part of creating that tension comes from sound. In an immersive Vision Pro environment, sounds can come from any direction, and the directer used that technology to his advantage. When the film opens, the combination of a dark enclosed space and eerie sounds drive the storytelling.

“We thought okay, how do we create tension with this medium? And where do we have tension? There’s silence, there is silence and distinct audio, noises like creaking of metal that’s underwater in the submarine. And we can take the audience by the hand and place them right next to our heroes on this vessel,” Berger says. “And the second is action we hadn’t really seen, because no one had made it, but we thought the contrast of tension is action. So to use the entire breadth of the medium of this technology, it felt like the best place to use it.”

“You have a lot of freedom to create your own guidance, or to create your own design, to create your own visual experience,” he says. “Some people might look over to the right because of that sound, some people might be more interested on the figure that crawls around in the left, so outside of your field of vision, you have a lot of things that you can design, create, use and really guide the audience’s gaze.”

Submerged joins a growing list of immersive video experience for the Vision Pro, which launched earlier this year.

Apple CEO Tim Cook was in active talks with filmmakers and other creatives about developing content for the device.

Submerged is the most ambitious scripted project yet, though others are also on the way.

“We started talking to a lot of creators, and everybody is blown away by the storytelling that can take place in this versus the tools of the past,” Cook said. “And so my gut is there’s going to be a lot of people running towards this, but we’ll see.”

Apple will debut a short film shot at the 2024 NBA All-Star Weekend, and the company is launching a series called Concert For One that brings users into an immersive concert experience. And the company is releasing new episodes of its immersive documentary series Elevated and Adventure.