Lugubrious, laborious and ridiculous – this movie version of Deborah Levy’s celebrated novel Swimming Home is frankly uncomfortable in the most wrong way possible. Film-maker and artist Justin Anderson has established himself as a creative visual talent but for this feature debut he has somehow conjured awful, torpid performances from his excellent cast, perpetually crowding up to them with pedantic, over-determined closeups. His film insists on a bafflingly unsexy and uninteresting type of erotic tension and conflates the result with a supposed repressed agony from the Bosnian war – which is invoked in the most glib and perfunctory way.
Joe (Christopher Abbott) is a famous poet of Bosnian extraction arriving at a luxurious holiday villa in Greece with his American wife Isabel (Mackenzie Davis), supposedly a foreign correspondent back from some traumatic assignment. Joe is depressed and creatively blocked; Isabel is subdued after the (unspecified) horrors on which she has just been reporting – and their marriage has been troubled. But from their performances it isn’t clear how intentional this numbed behaviour is supposed to be.
