Swimming Home: arty Deborah Levy adaptation never quite plumbs the depths of its characters

• Reviewed from the 2024 International Film Festival Rotterdam 

There’s something about the sun that amplifies everything: the feeling of being in our own skin, the sound of the insects, the weight of breath, the glances of strangers. The light from the swimming pool seems somehow brighter than the sun itself. This sense of amplification is prevalent in Swimming Home, Justin Anderson’s adaptation of Deborah Levy’s novel.  

Shifting the book’s location from Spain to Greece, the film tells of a middle class family, disrupted by the appearance of a naked stranger, Kitty, played by Ariane Labed, in their pool. I say disrupted but the family is already in a state of terminal fragmentation. Isabel (MacKenzie Davis) is a war journalist, or as her daughter Nina (Freya Hannan-Mills) describes it: “she goes to other countries to watch people kill each other.” Husband, father and one-time poet with a history of infidelity Joseph (Christopher Abbott) mopes in the background, eying Kitty.  

Coming from the video art via the fashion world, Anderson has a good eye for the piercing image which Simos Sarketzis’s camera captures with everything slightly off center, negative space a-go-go. Napoleon Stratogiannakis’s agitated editing adds to the nerve jangle and Coti K.’s score intervenes with a wall-knocking intensity similar to the film music of Mica Levi or Jonny Greenwood. Each element contributes to the feeling that everything is off and danger is imminent. The dialogue is gnomic with flashes of dark humour, and is performed with pauses that could be Pinteresque or the result of heat exhaustion. “Why were you in our pool?” someone asks, but neglects the crucial “without a swimming costume?”. 

Trained as a painter, Anderson furnishes his world with painterly references: the Hockney swimming pool, a handful of Dalían ants. There’s a crappy tourist attraction called ‘Ponyland’, and a mysterious venue where Isabel disappears at night to attend some full-on interpretive dance – both feel more like art installations than real places. Unfortunately, the characters are as thin as stretched canvas. A visiting friend Laura, played by film director Nadine Labaki, has flown in only to provide exposition on the family members. The strands of different experiences, Nina’s awakening sexuality, Joseph’s reckoning with his past as a Bosnian war orphan, Isabel’s emotional deadening – are never quite woven together. And Kitty, as the catalysing interloper – think Terence Stamp in Pasolini’s Theorem (1968) – never quite sparks a reaction.