Watch The Deep End For Free

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People are voting emotionally.

Good movie but grossly overrated

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Tilda is superb as always and the one real reason to see this. She colors the space around her with profound tensions. She's like Brando, able to improvise a whole sea of shifting emotions in the space between the outskirts of her character and innermost soul, but whereas Brando struts in that space in capricious absent-mindedness, she surfs on what flows from inside her, letting float inside but balancing on the out.The film needed this same ability to color narrative space.It needed for us to not be in full control of the facts and stumble through what floats inside to color the out. It would have benefited from threading early for example the son's suspicion that she might be having an affair while their father is out at sea instead of inserting it late in the story when we know she's not. It needed for her relationship with the mob guy to be ambiguously defined from afar. It teeters in silly sentimentality shown as it is.Check out Bastards (the Claire Denis film). It's also about a mother being profoundly torn by what she believes she couldn't prevent, also noir about reality becoming cursed and devious because she couldn't face it clearly. But it takes place in that space between eye and inmost soul that Tilda anxiously inhabits here (and gives us the most advanced logic of perception since Lynch). This one just embeds her in a plot of to and from.Noir Meter: 2/4

The Deep End is exactly the kind of drama thriller that was more frequent 10 years ago. Of course, it is from a decade ago, so it makes sense. It's a rather messy, but entertaining and sometimes even unpredictable thriller. I definitely didn't think it would become what it did or end the way it did, and I guess what the filmmakers intended to do with the lead character was different than I would have expected. The last act is full of some overly melodramatic moments, and some lines are full of cheese, but as a whole it's still a very solid film. The biggest reason to see this is for Tilda Swinton, who really gives a great performance here that only strengthens her resume. I think, if anything, the problem is that the film didn't do more with the moral dilemma at the its core and went for a rather surprisingly simple and convenient way out.

Tilda Swinton! What a gal! This harrowing and brilliantly filmed tale is a complete tour de force from beginning to end. Why is it that these modest independent films are always ignored for American awards? Swinton's performance is really Oscar material, and so are the writing and direction by the pair Scott McGehee (spelling that surname requires some practice!) and David Siegel. The film is based on a novel by Elizabeth Holding, and whoever chose that as the basis for a movie was very clever. The young Croatian actor Voran Visnjic (pronouncing that is even harder than spelling McGehee, but is apparently 'vish-nyich') was a brilliant choice for the other lead role in this film. The third role is Swinton's gay son, played sensitively and just right by Jonathan Tucker. Rarely has female multi-tasking been better portrayed than in this film, as Swinton carries out a multitude of household chores simultaneously with phone conversations, ironing separate piles of clothes and delivering them to their respective rooms, giving instructions to her children, negotiating her way out of blackmail which threatens to ruin her family, raising money while her husband is away on a battleship in the North Atlantic (he is an absent naval captain), plotting how to save her son from a murder rap, looking after her resident father-in-law, saving him from a heart attack, emptying the garbage, and much else besides. Swinton manages to make herself as unglamourous as possible, in order to simulate a 'normal American wife'. Of course there is no denying that she is one the strangest looking people on earth, a kind of alien in our midst. In certain shots, with the sunlight at a particular angle, the eerie green of her eyes shimmers like something from a sci fi film. Her very weirdness compels our attention, as we see this bizarre creature that she is enacting human roles, as if she were not really from outer space after all, but were 'one of us'. (I say 'us' for all those who really are from this planet.) Her genius is not just acting talent, it is the capacity to cast a spell. So you see, she really is another species, because she bewitches the viewer with some kind of extra-terrestrial magic, so that you become so absorbed you forget where you are. You could almost believe it is a Martian movie and you are on Mars watching it. That would fit. But then 'bang!' you are back to Reno, Nevada, which is all too earthly! There are lots of shots of the beautiful Lake Tahoe, beside which Swinton lives. And into her life comes the young blackmailer from a world of vice played by 'vish-nyich'. He is incredibly sensitive in delineating a 'lost' young man who slowly gains some humanity and reforms his character right before our eyes, a truly magical instance of character transformation, and frankly one of the most extreme examples of 'screen character development' in a mere 96 minutes ever filmed. The fact that 'vish-nyich' makes this convincing is a tribute to his profound acting skills. He has that handsome weak face that reminds one of the young Alain Delon. His thin cheeks even wobble in the same way at moments of stress. He conveys without any dialogue to support it at all his entire life history, how he never had a family, never knew a loving and attentive mother, always had a hard time and decided to become hard in turn, and proves how shallow the roots of all this ruthlessness really are within him. This film is truly a profound one, a masterpiece of film-making by all concerned, and it is a tense nail-biting thriller which has you on the edge of your Martian couch.

Easily one of the most subversively homophobic films ever produced. Gay men are presented as sordid, lascivious predators who exclusively lurk in harshly-lit gay bars in the corrupt big city, coming into suburban areas to prey on vulnerable, sensitive adolescent boys. The idea that this "good kid" would allow himself to be filmed in the act of having sex is preposterous enough, but the director really exploits the scene by showing the actual act with inter-cuts to Tilda Swinton's face looking repulsed and grief-stricken.What's even more dangerous about this film is the fact that it is full of Trojan horses: the indie feel of the production, the casting of Derek Jarman's muse Tilda Swinton (who should be inducted in a special hall of infamy for selecting this piece), and the fact that gay men were apparently involved in putting the film together.Perhaps the film has some artistic merits, but overall I found it an infuriating, irresponsible film that I would have preferred to miss.