[Review] The Midnight Swim
In Sarah Adina Smith’s debut film The Midnight Swim, domestic unrest is explored using the language of found-footage. Following the disappearance of their mother Amelia (Beth Grant), sisters June (Lindsay Burdge), Annie (Jennifer Lafleur), and Isa (Aleksa Palladino) return to their childhood home to honor her memory. June has taken up duties as documentarian. Their reunion is captured on camera, revealing uncomfortable truths about their estranged relationship. At the center of this drama is Spirit Lake, where Amelia is said to have drowned. Or, suggestively, where she was claimed. Its esoteric significance creates a vortex that pulls each sister in one by one.
The film is gorgeous and meditative. Shaheen Seth’s moody cinematography rounds out its solemn world with luminescence, especially at night. Atypical for a found-footage film, music (composed by Ellen Reid) is incorporated thoughtfully, accenting its dream-like qualities. Smith’s frame is steady but never idle, tracking the minutiae of siblings who attempt to reconnect with one another to varying degrees of success. Each performer is given space to unfurl emotionally, lending the film a realism within the genre it serves. Edits (also performed by Smith) are graceful, and the B-roll is clearly motivated by June’s own peculiar aesthetic sensibilities. The illusion is hardly broken, even as the younger sister pushes the camera into a realtor's face in one comedic scene. All while the director teases the audience with fragments of what may have happened during Amelia’s final moments.
The film utilizes Beth Grant’s sparse presence effectively. Glimpsed only through old video tapes and personal belongings, Amelia is allowed to remain mysterious even as she influences the narrative. Grant’s performance in turn becomes ethereal. The actor balances the experiences of a woman suffering from dissociation and being credibly under the hypnosis of the lake. The director capitalizes on this ambiguity during a scene in which the sisters take turns giving their impressions of Amelia. Each sister is cast eerily to Grant's likeness. While trivial in a basic drama about a broken family, this resemblance makes their disparate conclusions about one another all the more significant. It’s worth mentioning that aside from juggling the format of a faux documentary, Smith also harnesses the nostalgia of home movies without having to recreate them. Intimate details are written and delivered seamlessly between the sisters. Before we are interrupted by what appears to be a haunting, watching them come to terms with their dysfunction feels almost intrusive.
The grief-stricken folklore of the Pleiades is recounted in the film through dialogue and acts as a primer to further themes of death and its inevitability. As tension between the sisters escalates, their lighthearted response to this lore turns into a consideration of their own mortality. Yet despite the uncertainty surrounding Amelia, Smith suggests a hopeful fate. Her belief in reincarnation is also imprinted on her daughters, ensnaring June particularly. An obsession with Spirit Lake leads to a strange manipulation of footage that is dismissed by others. June focuses the camera solely on herself, with Burdge playing the character in a manner increasingly detached from reality. Though in large part a work of understatement, the film skillfully interrogates this uncanny space between loss and rebirth.
While The Midnight Swim is faithful to its subgenre, it can be a challenging watch both in terms of story and pacing. It shares strands of DNA with other spiritual found footage films Lake Mungo. But expectations for the kind of dread that film produces should be abandoned. In Smith’s cinematic realm, horror is derived from internal. What the director holds back in terms of conventional scares, she returns with profiles on characters who are pushed to unsettling depths. Her films often engage with suicidal ideation and the deaths of close family members. People are haunted and places hold a deep sense of alienation. That this is a style she crafted expertly right out of the gate is amazing. With the upcoming re-release by Yellow Veil Pictures, this gem has been granted a much-deserved second life, which is fitting for a story wrestling with that exact concept. The film is worth seeking out for its decisive and audaciously boundary-breaking finale.
The Midnight Swim is available for pre-order in a special collector’s BluRay edition from Yellow Veil Pictures and will be followed by a digital release on January 25, 2022.
