Swimming Home Review
Isabel (Mackenzie Davis), Josef (Christopher Abbott) and their teenage daughter Nina (Freya Hannan-Mills) arrive in Greece, for a family holiday with their friend Laura (Nadina Labaki). When they get there, they find a naked woman, Kitti (Ariane Labed), in their pool. Though they are varying levels of disturbed by her unexpected presence, the family nonetheless allow her to stay with them, and she has an effect that will change all of their lives forever.
Swimming Home is based on the novel by Deborah Levy. At 176 pages, it’s a slim novel, and there’s a concomitant slightness to the movie’s narrative. Not a lot happens here; it’s a film that surfs by on vibes and looks and heavy atmosphere.
Still, our main couple have backstories that could certainly power heavier plots. Josef was a war orphan in Bosnia. As an adult, he has become a fairly successful poet, although he hasn’t published in some time. He can’t stop cheating on Isabel, a war correspondent who feels more comfortable in battle zones than she does at home. Any affection the two may have shared has departed long before we join them, replaced by a low hum of lethargy and warmed-over resentments. Neither of them are close to 15-year-old Nina, who’s the first to bond with the mysterious Kitti.
It’s all dramatically fertile stuff, but screenwriter-director Justin Anderson does not seem at all invested in digging in. What makes that even more frustrating is that he has such fine actors to work with. Mackenzie Davis is adept at elevating sub-par material across a range of genres (and proved how capable she is at marriage drama in last year’sSpeak No Evil). There are few working actors as good at adding intense dimension to inner turmoil as Christopher Abbott. They barely have any screentime together, and rarely seem like actual flesh and blood humans. Then you have Nadine Labaki, a formidable director in her own right, there purely to provide what little exposition the movie does have. If you’re looking for an engaging story, Swimming Home is not for you.
If you treat it as a more abstract piece of filmmaking however, the whole thing becomes a lot more interesting. From a sensorial perspective, Swimming Home is a hypnotic experience. While this is Anderson’s first narrative feature, his background in painting and making short films for fashion designers translates into a gorgeous aesthetic. He has an instinct for striking blocking, and he and cinematographer Simos Sarketzis weave a world of hyper saturated peaches and turquoises cast in hazy, honey-coloured light. This photography pairs beautifully with Coti K.’s atmospheric score; by far the best sections of the movie are when any pretence of a plot is jettisoned completely, and Napoleon Stratogiannakis’ lyrical cutting weaves the visual and aural elements together into sequences of cinematic ecstasy.
Such ecstatic sequences didn’t need to be mutually exclusive from telling an absorbing story, and it does still feel that the presence of some of today’s finest working actors is a little wasted here. Nevertheless, Swimming Home still has plenty to offer outside of the bounds of a satisfying narrative.
★★★
