Three sisters return to their deceased mother’s home on a mysterious lake in The Midnight Swim for sororal bonding and to determine the future of their mother’s estate. The acting and casting are phenomenal. The cinematography and direction are so perfectly poised that it feels like the independent film had as high a budget as a vanity fragrance commercial, which is a compliment since those commercials are usually high quality, artsy fartsy short films used for profit.
Unfortunately The Midnight Swim needed a lot more work and decisiveness before moving it from the page to the big screen. The story suffers from too much ambiguity. Do we have an unreliable narrator in the form of a cameraman, June, one of the sisters, who has mental challenges that are not elaborated on? Is the lake supernatural? If it is, is it a harbinger of doom or a passageway? The film wants to have its cake and eat it too.
Even though I love found footage movies and fake documentaries, I was unaware that The Midnight Swim straddled those genres before watching it. I was slightly disappointed that it was not a drama because I wanted to disappear into the story instead of being hyperaware that I was watching a fictional work and subconsciously wondering how real it felt. A movie gives viewers the illusion of being a fly on the wall watching things as they unfold. Found footage and fake documentaries add credibility to sensational events that transpire in the film. Because of the casting and the acting, I did not need the genre to do the heavy lifting. The genre actually undercut the performances because I kept anticipating that something bad would happen instead of just letting events transpire so when something eerie happens, it is anti-climatic. The filmmakers leaned too heavily on building tension and creating a loaded atmosphere then not releasing it when the relationships and history provided sufficient psychological tension without needing the crutch of a supernatural event as a metaphor. It is very unusual to create three-dimensional characters that almost organically create a story more riveting that the supernatural can offer.
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Amelia Brooks is their mother, an environmentalist. It is implied that Amelia intended that each sister have a different father. Only Isa, who is into reincarnation, has a relationship with her father, who may be wealthy because she keeps saying he will fund her vague enterprises. Annie, played by Jennifer Lafleur, is the oldest, most practical, mentally healthy, married with children, but had a miscarriage and was estranged from her mother, who was verbally abusive to her when, as a child, she did not take care of her little sisters. June, the camerawoman, is the most quiet of the three, refuses to eat in front of people and seems laconically intrigued by the mystery.
When they arrive at the house, we meet Josh, a recently divorced father and childhood friend who looks like the discount version of Dermot Mulrooney. I thought Isa was teasing Annie, and that Annie used to have a relationship with him in her teens, but Wikipedia says that June used to have a crush on him, which the film did not covey to me. June obsessively recorded everything so I did not think that she gave Josh more attention than others even though she definitely crosses some boundaries by filming him while Isa and Josh cuddle. Josh was a bit of a mercenary looking for a two for one deal with Isa-sex and money, his latest sugar mama. He got way too proprietary over Isa and her vote on what should happen to the house for my tastes. June should have more of a say in this transaction than he does!
Annie seemed to have latent sparks with Josh at dinner, but also is mature enough to know that he is a different person from the person that she knew. She does not fall for Isa’s baiting. I like Lafleur, who looks a bit like Lucy Lawless, and her character was my favorite of the three sisters. Annie cooks, suggests mani pedis and sets clear boundaries without the instinct to clear her browser history to pretend that death retroactively made someone nicer than they were. She has the most chilling scene when she channels her mother while playing with her sisters. She consistently pushed back when others tried to impose a narrative onto her experience without lashing out.
Isa got on my nerves. She is the kind of person that you plan a vacation with then they disappear the entire time. I love being alone too, and you should not spend the entire time together, but damn, I did not have to go with you. Ahem. She is the woman who can’t be without a guy for a second. Plus I thought she was objectively a jerk. She did not appreciate Annie’s cooking, kept trying to make Annie feel bad about her relationship with her mom, and it does not matter which sister had a thing for Josh, it was not cool to make a mad dash to claim dibs on him before clearing the air. She kept making jokes about drowning, and dude, your mom likely drowned to death. Did you dry clean that scarf? She bulldozed over everyone about what to do with the property instead of discussing it before the real estate agent arrived. She probably does not have a real vocation and just depends on others to do things for her while she expounds in a manner that she thinks is mystically brilliant, but is actually breathtakingly cliché. Are you a teenage girl staring in a mirror while chanting Candyman? She was a complete poseur and kept going on about the supernatural, but I did appreciate that once she realized that crap was real, she became sober sally and hightailed it out of there. Still she thought everyone should be amused by her act, but was completely intolerant when June acted similarly and at least had a valid medical reason for her behavior. Isa was an inconsiderate, careless jerk, but I appreciated that once she saw danger, she bounced hard, and no man or sister could stand in her way to hit the road fast enough. She has steel in her despite her eye roll worthy weaknesses.
June is orchestrating all the weird shenanigans, but there are also objective supernatural events. Real talk: I’d rather deal with someone like June, who at least is mentally ill, than Isa, who is too grown to be acting a fool without a doctor’s note. Side note: how did she get the birds? Maybe I should rethink my instinctual choices.
The Midnight Swim sacrificed the characters’ natural momentum for an unsatisfying, shifting supernatural angle. Ultimately I think that the film was trying to say something about reincarnation, and the river of forgetting reminded me of the Styx. The closing credits suggest that June is reborn, but with the vengeful drowned ghost sisters being linked with a star cluster that seems to go nowhere, it just seemed like a lot of allusions with no cohesive payoff even if it can be explained by a madwoman’s daydreams. Lost and Damon Lindelof should have taught creators that it is better not to have any supernatural elements than to have them go nowhere.