
The suburbs are hell. That’s what the movies keep telling us. Perfect nuclear families living in their McMansions are often anything but perfect. It’s not exactly new cinematic territory, but it’s a well that gets tapped often because it’s just a lot of fun to watch rich families implode, often of their own doing. In that vein, the new suburban-set thriller “The Girl in the Pool” from director Dakota Gorman and screenwriter Jackson Reid Williams, breaks no new ground. But with its many twists and turns, it is indeed a lot of fun.
Teen sensation turned right-wing taco writer Freddy Prinze Jr. embodies the family head Tom a businessman who whilst still looking strong, seems a bit over the hill ( at some point Prinze Jr. gets water splashed on his face and I catch an oddly bald image of the mirror and it’s just shocking how rare it is to see any of the stars actually allow themselves to look old on-screen). Tom is about to meet his wife and has left work early after coming back from a big dinner. He is told he cannot go to such events and is surprised by a younger mistress.
Tom’s suburban landscape can be portrayed as dull as there has been a consistent emphasis on their family purchases. This emphasis transforms Tom’s idle whaling in the afternoon into a brutal scene and leaves his eyes wide in confusion at the point where he is trying to make sense of things with his two children, Alex and Rose, in the frame. Their encounter in the family pool seems to quickly degenerate into a slaughterhouse. The audience is led to believe Tom is the culprit as he even attempts to cover up the woman’s dead body during Fluffy’s surprise party hosted by his spouse and kids. However, there is no indication as to who committed the crime or what the rationale was, as it leaves you seemingly in Tom’s psyche and he focuses on the events that took place earlier on as well as the consequences of the events.
There is so much commotion in the house because it is admirable the people are elated and filled with joy to celebrate the birthday of on flutie. And because the people are celebrating, they put pressure on Tom because no one seems to understand where the body has been hidden in their previous brawl. Instead, he’s disturbed by his father-in-law William, who has dry sarcasm, and he states something incredibly relevant. Tom and Kristen have been having marital troubles for a long time. Another unanticipated surprise is a guest that drives Tom insane because such things are intolerable. As drugs kick in and start turning Tom into a frenzied drug addict along with a few other incidents, the film consistently adds tension to the storyline until the point where just about everyone has blood on their hands.
In another agile scene, Gorman changes gears cutting to a more relaxing angle, allowing the viewers to see Alex, Rose, and her boyfriend staring at Tom while also watching the frazzled version of Tom walking awkwardly around the backyard.
Fresh is the idea that we, the audience, are not only watching a film but there is a character in Tom, who is so significant as if he is also an actor in a film of his own. It is too bad then that Gorman’s direction is not this unflinching all the time as there is an undertone of caddy Witz in William’s script which could have turned this whole thing actually into a dark comedy.
It is the same pattern in the faulty characterization of women. Haugh’s Hannah appears to be created only for the purpose of a bikini-clad actress with lots of irrelevant lines as she is a red herring. The always-reliable Potter gives the largely one-dimensional character that is Kristen, a hardened edge. I kept anticipating the intense solo performance that she performs in the similarly provocative mystery “Along Came a Spider”. Sadly it is never delivered. Similarly, Rosie is equally one-dimensional with her character being a collection of Gen-Z cliches, although Barbusca does at least try to inject some life into her tiresome character with fun dialogue delivery.
It is intentional that the son Alex remains an outsider in the action for the most part, who only comes to the fore in the last act twist. As for Gray, he really goes all out into slinging everything from one idiotic justification for his rotten behavior more reasonable than the last. Just a shadow of the father who was also just another one-dimensional self-centered smug.
Naturally, Prinze Jr who also was one of the executive producers has the juiciest part, portraying the role of an anguished Tom very well. While Tom in the beginning is presented as a spineless mass, he always has been. He even has the nerve to ask his friend ‘Am I a good man’ at the start but everyone knows the answer even before he opens his mouth. The movie has no ambitions of peaching the audience, only offers an image of a helpless Tommy. Desperate as a tear, he repeatedly pleads for ‘just five minutes’’ in order to devise a strategy, but it appears that it is not Tom’s problem since a strategy is not available in his psyche anyway.
The filmmaker plunges the knife into the wound by displaying his last remark in a tragic manner, which underlines the simmering feeling that the raging white man no matter how young will always be defended by authoritative figures. What they offered to do would look good on a full-bodied smear. Rather, the film concludes with a whimper. Any glimmer of hope for a poisonous endeavor that leaves consumerism quaking in terror instead languishes in the middle ground of aggressively ordinary.
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