Swimming Home

When a family arrives at their villa in a remote coastal village, they find a stranger floating in their swimming pool. The mysterious woman with green fingernails claims to be a botanist and her lingering presence comes to emphasise the distance that already exists between the parents, war-correspondent Isabel and melancholic poet Joe. Tensions mount, temperatures rise and a perfect vacation transforms into a perilous spectacle, magnified by the beauty of the landscape that it erupts across. Acclaimed writer Deborah Levy’s 2011 novel makes for an unsettling feature. Like the novel, Justin Anderson’s accomplished debut skirts the fringes of genre, dipping its toes into psychodrama and horror, while remaining a singular take on the dynamics of a pathologically dysfunctional family. With a dash of humour and absurdity, his script zeroes in on the pain of unspoken grievances and barely concealed desires. Mackenzie Davis and Christopher Abbott impress as a couple barely holding on to the tenuous thread of their relationship, as does Nadine Labaki as a family friend caught up in the maelstrom, Ariane Labed gives a performance of unbridled corporeality as the stranger, the ambiguity of her presence soon giving way to something more tangible and infernal. (International Film Festival Rotterdam)