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I cannot help but cheer when a new female filmmaker breaks out with a powerful, enigmatic film. Sarah Adina Smith's debut feature The Midnight Swim (2014) has a mystical, ethereal quality which does not make it fit neatly into the "horror cinema" box. Yet the film's mysteries, and their psychological effects on its characters, help create a very haunted atmosphere, saturated with dread.
The film begins as Amelia Brooks' three daughters, sensible Annie (Jennifer Lafleur), sensual Isa (Aleksa Palladino), and awkwardly neurotic June (Lindsay Burdge) reunite in the wake of their mother's disappearance. None of the women seem especially surprised by their mother's "death," as her life had become focused on finding the bottom of a seemingly bottomless lake--one on which rests the family's vacation home. The sisters are there, ostensibly, to get their mother's assets in order, but the focus of the story leans more heavily on the intricately knotted relationships between the siblings. Watching the tensions and affections between these women blossom and unfold is one of the richest pleasures that the film brings. Smith really nails the rhythms between female siblings. Their recent loss brings out both their playfulness with each other, as well as their competitiveness. Mental Illness lurks in their past as well.
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| Isa, June and Annie lip sych "Free to Be You and Me" |
Joined by a childhood pal/crush, Josh (Ross Partridge), one night in fun, the women decide to invoke the "seven sisters" myth--a dark fairy tale that combines a narrative about entrapped femininity, female powerlessness, and nature's thirst for vengeance. While initially nothing seems to come of it, as the weekend unfolds, strange events start to occur. Dead birds show up on their doorstep, noises are heard in the night, and someone or something gets a hold of June's video camera and shoots night footage of a midnight swim. Has one of the seven sisters come back to haunt them, or is their mother talking to them from the other side?
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| June's camera symbolizes her distorted worldview |
The Midnight Swim could be considered largely a "found-footage film" in that from the film's earliest moments, the experiences at the lake are seen exclusively through June's camera lens. Since June is a documentary filmmaker, this perspective does not seem initially that out of the ordinary. Annie and Isa seem fairly used to the camera always being present (and recording). Other characters, not so much. In one particularly striking scene, a real estate agent over to discuss selling the house is the target of June's scrutiny, and her camera slowly and unnervingly zooms into close-up on this poor woman while she tries to talk to the other sisters. The scene is funny, yet highlights June's use of the camera as a crutch by which she interacts with the world. The film's focused visual perspective forces the spectator to spend the most time with June, seeing the world through her eyes. Yet that perspective becomes problematic when it becomes more and more clear that June is an unreliable and perhaps rather unstable narrator. The film's visual authority then becomes suspect.
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| The film's fairy tale elements are undermined by June's mental instability |
June's tenuous grasp of reality somewhat tempers the film's aura of supernatural dread. Even a film directed by a woman seems unable to escape the cultural struggles women filmmakers undergo to maintain narrative and visual authority. Like another famous documentary filmmaker lost in the supernatural woods--Heather Donohue from The Blair Witch Project--June's single-minded interest in documenting the spooky events at the lake house are ultimately framed as misguided symptoms of a woman who cannot be trusted or believed.
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| Who actually is taking the Midnight Swim? |
While I am mildly disappointed by the way mental illness is wielded in the film's narrative, and to whom it concerns, in no way does it truly take a way from this film's visual, aural, and narrative triumphs. I don't know if two glowing reviews, from Twitch and Indiewire respectively, frame this film as an "critical darling," but I'll throw my hand in by saying that The Midnight Swim is one of the most striking and provocative achievements that I've seen at the Fantasia Film Festival so far. I hope Ms. Smith gets a distributor for this film, so that more people can experience her sharply drawn and evocative world.
