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A modern noir in which a mother must protect her teenage son from a blackmailer who has a videotape in which he can be seen having sex with a much older man, an older man who has just been found dead and had questionable taste in friends. The Deep End is a solid noir with a twisting plot and solid lead actress in the great Tilda Swinton, and strong supporting roles for Jonathan Tucker, Josh Lucas, and Goran Visnjic. Though it must be said, The Deep End is mostly an excuse to indulge in the noir trope of watching a brittle woman slowly break over time.
The film never finds that extra spark that allows it go from very commendable, strongly made work to superlative, but it’s smart to play all of its major chips on Swinton’s shoulders. She makes every tiny shift from composed to frantic to a nervous breakdown and back with ease and skill that makes it look as if she isn’t even acting at all. While the story hits every plot turn you would expect, Swinton makes it feel real and lived in, her very presence keeps the ante high and clearly visible.
Yet the film crumbles when the main heavy is revealed. Josh Lucas’s brief time as the older man who very existence and dangerous sexual charisma appear to threaten mother and son lingers in the mind despite his short screen time. So Raymond Barry had a big task in crafting a man who seemed like a credible enough threat to blow Lucas from the memory and go toe-to-toe with Swinton, and he doesn’t live up to the task at hand. Visnjic begins as his second-in-command before slowly switching sides and crumbling to the moral complexity of his actions. Visnjic needed to appear mysterious and then change to supportive, and he does a fine job with this. Barry needed to appear calm, in control, and quietly threatening, but The Deep End stumbles here. It’s the major crime keeping the film from making that extra leap from very good to great.
