“Swimming Home is a promising debut for Anderson, somebody to keep an eye on in the future; the raw talent is clearly there, and with the right project a masterpiece is in the works.”

When it’s dry the bears come down from the mountains to drink from the swimming pools, they say. When Josef (Christopher Abbott) and his wife Isabel (Mackenzie Davis) return home from picking up their friend Laura (Nadine Labaki), all they find in the pool of their Greek summer villa is a naked woman. Kitti (Ariane Labed), she calls herself. She says she’s a friend of the help around the house, Vito. Slowly Kitti works her way into the lives of Josef, Isabel, and their daughter Nina (Freya Hannan-Mills). Given the dysfunctionality of the family, it doesn’t take long for the first fissures to show up. Kitti seems to be aware of a past trauma in Josef’s life, something he has never properly given in to. The presence of the mysterious woman unnerves the arrogant poet as much as it intrigues Isabel, and Nina falls completely under the influence of their mystery guest. The more the family falls under Kitti’s spell, the more their infernal and explosive hidden conflicts come to the surface, the water washing off the thin veneer of harmony.

Based on Deborah Levy’s same-titled novel from 2011, director Justin Anderson for his first feature Swimming Home has assembled a strong cast to embody a family with simmering grievances and a catalyst to unravel their already brittle bonds. Abbott is convincing as a self-obsessed man with unresolved trauma, a known philanderer who thinks nothing of his extra-martial affairs and expects his wife to do the same. Davis turns in an equally strong performance as a woman who, despite a strenuous relationship, still loves her husband through her acidity. But the film belongs to the magnetic presence of Labed, one of her generation’s most electrifying and fearless performers. She embodies Kitti with a poisonous streak (even literally!) and a carnal physicality that culminates in two truly frightening overlapping scenes drenched in body horror that would have made David Cronenberg proud.

Labed is not the only asset at Anderson’s disposal to create an unsettling experience. His compositions, full of deep close-ups and characters positioned towards the edge of the screen, threatening to fall out of it, have the eye wandering, which makes for a restless viewing experience (which is entirely the point). Coti K.’s fantastic score of ambient electronica menacingly plucks at the brain, and is an early contender for score of the year not only because of the music itself, but also because it heightens the psychological horror Swimming Home inflicts on its audience. The constant dread works best when it places the actors in and around the house, having their layered conversations that seem pleasant enough on the surface. As we wander off to the coastline, with its plethora of well-proportioned naked men being naked for the sake of it, the weirdness-just-because is aimless. Better fare are the scenes in a club Isabel frequents, where she watches freakish and weirdly erotic dance performances straight out of a David Lynch film, all the more so because they play an important role in the film’s finale.

Though the film can be seen as the demented love child of Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash and last year’s Infinity Pool by that other Cronenberg, Swimming Home shows that Anderson has his own vision and is finding his voice. It also shows that this is still a first film, and the young Brit is dipping his toe in different genres to feel the waters. Not all his ideas stick, and the reason Labaki’s character is in the film is unclear, though she is involved in the film’s single most straightforward moment of comedy. Elsewhere the humour is more sinister and stems from unease. Swimming Home is a promising debut for Anderson, somebody to keep an eye on in the future; the raw talent is clearly there, and with the right project a masterpiece is in the works. Swimming Home is not that, but just Ariane Labed’s intense performance alone makes it worth the price of admission. Sometimes you’d rather find a bear in your pool than a naked woman…