‘Swimming Home’: Rotterdam Review

Dir/scr: Justin Anderson. UK. 2024. 99mins

The marriage between poet Joe (Christopher Abbott) and war correspondent Isabel (Mackenzie Davis) is strained even before they find a strange woman floating, naked, in the pool of their holiday home. Then Isabel invites the woman, Kitti (Ariane Labed), to stay in the guest house, unleashing unsettling and unpredictable tensions that seep into the household like a slow-acting poison.

A striking but willfully confounding experience

The debut film from commercials and short films director Justin Anderson, adapted from the Man Booker Prize-nominated novel of the same name by Deborah Levy, Swimming Home is a striking but willfully confounding experience. It will not be for everyone, and the knotty symbolism of the storytelling may be better suited to its original form as a novel than to the slightly scattershot approach of this film. Still, there’s a disconcerting, jarring quality to the story that is hard to shake – this is likely to be a conversation starter at further festivals and could find a home with a curated streaming platform.

The presence of Attenberg and Alps actor Labed and the film’s Greek location are not the only links with the uncanny oddness of the Greek Weird Wave. The film’s heightened, slightly mannered dramatic approach has a kinship with the early work of Yorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari. At other times, the picture evokes the stylised synthetic quality of the work of Jessica Hausner.

There is also a teasingly artificial quality to both the storytelling – these characters are defiantly allegorical constructions rather than persuasive flesh and blood people – and to the backdrop. This is a world in which beautiful, impassive men pose, clothes-free, like statues by the sea shore, and in which Isabel regularly visits a nightclub with a grotesque, avant-garde contemporary dance floorshow.

The setting for the story, an airy rented villa that comes with a hot-pants-sporting handyman, is elegantly restrained. Not so the score: a deconstructed symphony of scraping strings and discord, this is music that feels like a slow-motion nervous breakdown. And an extended inverted shot at the film’s opening, placing the sky under our feet and the trees in the air, underlines the promise of confounded expectations.

Into this world steps Kitti, who claims to be a botanist and snacks on the poisonous plants that grow wild in the scrubland near the coast. She forges an immediate bond with Joe and Isabel’s teenage daughter Nina (Freya Hannan-Mills) but alarms both Joe, whose poetry she quotes back to him with a zealot’s fervour, and the family’s other house guest Laura (an underused Nadine Labaki).

Who is she? What is she? What does she want? Kitti uses her (frequently naked) body as a weapon – having regularly eaten small quantities of hemlock and deadly nightshade, her physical being is, she claims, now poisonous. But perhaps equally toxic are the doubts and questions that she drip feeds into Joe’s ears – she seems to know a lot about his early life as a child refugee from conflict in Bosnia, something that he prefers never to talk about.

Maybe Kitti, described at one point as “a window waiting to be climbed through”, is best thought of as an opportunity, a moment of change. She is a catalyst for each of the family members in turn, all of whom are waiting for an excuse to disengage themselves from the disappointments and expectations of family life.