The Deep End
Dir. Scott McGehee & David Siegel, screenplay also by these two.
Stars Tilda Swinton, Goran Visnjic.
Glad I didn’t pay to see this one. It’s billed as a thriller, but I got nothing out of it thrill-wise. Didn’t jump out of my seat, didn’t feel scared at any point. The soundtrack is this really annoying, repetitive little jingly number, sort of like you always get in these sorts of movies, but it seemed just to be playing _constantly_, it really got to me. The fact that I even noticed the soundtrack tells you something about how boring the rest of it was.
Brief synopsis: Margaret Hall (Swinton) hides the body of her son’s lover in order to prevent her son being implicated in his murder. Alek Spera (Visnjic) rocks up and tries to blackmail Margaret for $50,000. Margaret carries lots of bags of shopping around and drops the kids to ballet and water-polo about a hundred times over, just to prove that she is a hard working mother who does what mothers in movies do. Oh yeah, and she lives in big lakeside house, hubby is off at sea and there’s a bit of a water theme happening, though the water theme really seems to have nothing to do with anything, it’s just sort of bunged on. Alek is really not so bad, and the two of them get a bit of a dynamic going. Ah god it’s shit. That’s about it really, without spoiling it... there’s atmospheric wank-off and then it just ends. The ending seemed to offend quite a number of patrons, who walked, and I don’t blame them, and though I won’t spoil it for you, it’s a really atrocious ending. Atrocious, ridiculous, and possibly offensive, quite a combination. At this point I couldn’t tell whether people in the cinema were crying or derisively sniggering.
So this was supposed to be “...a thriller with something deeply personal, even transcendent...astonishingly charged.” (Daily News.) What a load of bollocks! “Astonishingly charged.” What wank! ‘Charged’ just means “has a jingly theme in it, and you see this same aquarium about 20 times over”. A symbolically ‘significant’ aquarium. Chikackika jingle, jangle, spooky spooky... and then.. the aquarium!! Ooooh ! Unnerving! There’s no thrills whatsoever, nothing HAPPENED, the characters just talked, someone got an axe in his arm (I quietly chuckled to myself at the people going “uggh” at this point, having seen Braindead a few nights before — “you think that’s gory!! hahahahaha!! got a lawnmower? ...”) and I’m usually quite easily affected by thrillers; and no emotional involvement whatsoever, not for me anyway.
Just another crap American movie really, full of all the same old clichés and stereotypes.
Matt
