Swimming Home
In his directorial debut, Justin Anderson adeptly conjures scenes from a broken marriage. Based on Deborah Levy’s titular novel, Swimming Home begins with a sinisterly inverted scenic car journey. Author Joe (Christopher Abbott) and his traumatised foreign correspondent wife, Isabel (Mackenzie Davis), arrive at their holiday home when they find a nude woman, Kitti (Ariane Labed), swimming in their pool. She is revealed to be an acquaintance of the couple’s friend, Vito (Anastasios Alexandropoulos), who is holidaying with them (though he admittedly seems to know very little about her).
An enigmatic figure, Kitti at first appears to be a clichéd manic pixie dream girl, but soon it becomes clear that this free-spirited nature is symptomatic of her altogether more disturbing ideation. She crosses a line with Isabel and Joe’s 15-year-old daughter, Nina (newcomer Freya Hannan-Mills), by asking about her sexual preferences and remarking on the attractiveness of her father, whose photo she wistfully traces on a book jacket.
Joe and Isabel barely utter a word to one another, instead sharing furtive glances and repressed resentment. It’s a particularly bleak relationship, one failing due to emotional ineptitude and antipathy. Much like Isabel is reeling from an unspecified work-related incident, Joe, too, appears to be carrying the scars of trauma. Abbott and Davis both do a superb job of outwardly manifesting what a pithy script does not afford. But the script is sparse to a fault. Despite its warm climate, the film is cold and stoic, and it would benefit from greater exploration into the characters’ troubled psyches. Instead, we get stilted dialogue with cryptic responses.
However, Anderson undoubtedly has an eye for invention. There are multiple esoteric shots of iridescent water and fragmented body parts that are genuinely evocative. It’s fitting that Labed is the wife of Yorgos Lanthimos, as the film has a stylistic aesthetic reminiscent of the Greek auteur’s works. Electronic composer Coti K’s unsettling score perfectly captures the foreboding atmosphere.
Though better pacing and a tighter script might have elevated it further, Swimming Home is enjoyably idiosyncratic fare with a macabre twist. A darkly comic exploration of marital repression, Anderson does an admirable job of shining a light on the perils of allowing emotional immaturity and inhibition to fester.
Antonia Georgiou
Swimming Home is released nationwide on 25th April 2025.
Watch the trailer for Swimming Home here:
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