The Deep End

The first thing an attentive viewer will notice about "The Deep End" is that its images are so liquid, they positively shimmer. The film opens in a bar bathed in oblique light coming from behind diaphanous curtains. Its credits roll over an extended shot of a rippling lake, taken from a helicopter moving fast over it; this shot becomes a bit disturbing with its hypnotically quick substitution of sameness for sameness, supported by hazy, ominous guitar ostinatos playing in the soundtrack. These liquid images, provided by the extremely skilled cinematographer Giles Nuttgens, run throughout the film, shattering any certainties by their very presence.

These images are opposed to the plot, which follows an inexorable arc to its conclusion. Therein lies the modest, subtle, affecting genius of this film. Scott McGehee and David Siegel wrote, produced and directed this adaptation of Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's novel "The Blank Wall," and its plot is standard semi-domestic thriller with a little modern seediness thrown in for spice. But the film is written, shot, and paced with such self-effacing skill, and Tilda Swinton gives such a mesmerizing performance in the lead, that "The Deep End" gets under one's skin and stays there by sowing uncertainty in a world which we like to think is solid.

We join the film as the dissolution is already in progress. In a house looking onto the lake from the titles, Margaret Hall devotes herself to the minutiae of motherhood, pickups and donations and making sure the t's are crossed and the i's are dotted. She is not a saint - too rigid, certain, cutting - but a good woman nevertheless. But she is worried, because her son Beau, in between applying to colleges and playing jazz and water polo, has gotten involved with a much older man who runs a nightclub.

After hearing noises during the night, Margaret finds Beau's lover's corpse by the dock in the morning, with an anchor sticking through it. With the strength and decisiveness of purpose that only come when one does not think, she hides the body and destroys all the evidence that could lead investigators to her son. It turns out she is not entirely successful at this, and a man soon comes by to blackmail her, demanding money she does not have.

These are unfamiliar forces intruding on a life which, one can sense, may have seemed a little too familiar. It is an enormous credit to Tilda Swinton that she communicates this without beating the audience over its collective head, and it is a credit to McGehee and Siegel that they give her the space to do it. There's not really so much plot to this film for its ninety-nine minutes; the length gives the film time to settle into the structure of domestic life, and to watch it buckle and fail in time of stress. Often, it seems as if thriller heroes do not have jobs or obligations, and are free to concentrate their energies on whatever problem has presented itself; we never feel that here, and (especially in one scene involving a medical emergency) "The Deep End" is all the more terrifying for it.

Margaret herself never quite fails, but she comes perilously close. She already seems a bit out of place due to her accent; Swinton, a Scottish actress, speaks an English that is not British but is nevertheless too pure for America. But most of her performance is not verbal at all, but visual, contained in the nuances of her body and face: the slump and sudden rise of a shoulder, the slight aversion of eyes in an otherwise open face, the desolation of loneliness and helplessness evident as she casts her eyes just briefly into the distance. Her certainty is tested, palpably, and she makes us feel that she may well not be able to navigate this new world of shadows and shades and half-seeing. Swinton's performance is powerful and subtle and, like the film, irresistible.

The only problem with "The Deep End" is that so much care and intelligence has been used to make it that you want more. The film has nothing "deeper," as such, than the play of sunlight on the water, and Swinton's performance cannot quite elevate anything in here to the level of a universal truth. But what "The Deep End" tries to do, it does, and does with such effectiveness that you will remember it for a while if you make the effort to seek it out. That much, at least, remains certain.

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