Swimming Home, at times, feels like a parody of what people think indie, arthouse cinema is. There are long, lingering looks, conversations that go nowhere but appear to have a deeper meaning, and quite a lot of nudity. While these features can contribute beautifully to intriguing and challenging narratives – they’re cliches for a reason – here there is little below the surface.

The story begins with a car journey. A man, who appears to be in a bad mood, is being driven to a villa with his wife and their friends. His mood does not improve over the course of the film – in fact, he shows little emotion at all. Joe (Christopher Abbott) is a tortured poet type, suffering from writer’s block and unwilling to engage much with those around him.

Joe is a deeply uninteresting character. His childhood trauma is explained at the end of the film, but the big reveal feels completely incongruous with anything that happens in the story. He spends most of the film debating whether or not he should cheat on his wife (again) and being miserable about it, with all the emotional expression of a rock. Blatant imagery of sexual frustration and repression abounds, at points overwhelmingly obliquely, but it’s difficult to feel any engagement with his struggles.

The potential subject of his cheating is Kitti (Ariane Labed), a friend of the holiday villa’s owner Vito (Anastasios Alexandropoulos) who they find lying naked in the pool. Joe’s wife Isabel (Mackenzie Davis) spontaneously invites Kitti to stay with them, in part to see whether her husband will give in to such obvious temptation, in part because of her own fascination with the woman. The stranger befriends the couple’s neglected teenage daughter, Nina (Freya Hannan-Mills), who opens up without reservation and divulges some handy exposition. There’s a bit of a coming-of-age story for Nina here, with Kitti prying about her romantic life and taking her to a gay cruising area nearby to stare at naked men. Her parents never ask what their daughter is up to, far too self-involved to worry about her life.

Kitti is a boring concept of an interesting character, a manic pixie dream girl-like figure who floats into the characters’ lives with quirks such as eating poisonous plants and asking soul-seeking questions. Her dialogue feels like it’s been lifted from conversations between 15-year-olds who think they’re deeply profound. Her flirtations with the entire family lacking intrigue, eroticism or charm.

Interspersed with the bubbling marital and sexual tension are passages of interpretive dance. Exactly what is being interpreted is not always clear, but these segments are nonetheless impactful. With a penchant for backbends, dancers contort into jarring shapes and move in distinctly inhuman ways in a way that is affecting and disturbing. It’s an achievement to create something so uncomfortable and body horror-adjacent with choreography alone, even if the passages don’t always gel with the rest of the film’s tone.

From start to finish, Swimming Home feels like it’s on the edge of saying something. Themes are touched on lightly, suggesting a much greater depth to the story than we’re allowed to see, but the film never fully commits to any of them. Ideas of desire and the consequences of acting or not acting on it, the conflict of knowledge and memory, wanting to feel or not feel; it’s all ripe for exploration, but the film seems set on maintaining an aloof, overly opaque approach that prevents any character or motif to be much deeper than a paddling pool.

Swimming Home could be a hallucinogenic exploration of a relationship, of people in personal and interpersonal turmoil, but leans a little too far into languid aesthetics to be an engaging study of its subjects. The story behind what we see on screen seems far more interesting than what we’re given – it’s a shame that we never get to see any of it.

Swimming Home will be released in cinemas 25th April 

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