The suburbs are hell. That’s what the movies keep telling us. Perfect nuclear families living in their McMansions are often anything but perfect. It’s not exactly new cinematic territory, but it’s a well that gets tapped often because it’s just a lot of fun to watch rich families implode, often of their own doing. In that vein, the new suburban-set thriller “The Girl in the Pool,” from director Dakota Gorman and screenwriter Jackson Reid Williams, breaks no new ground. But with its many twists and turns, it is indeed a lot of fun.
One-time teen idol Freddie Prinze Jr. plays the family patriarch Tom, a businessman, who, while still handsome, feels past his prime (at one point, Prinze Jr. splashes his face with water and the back of his balding head reflects in the mirror, and it struck me how rare it is to see any stars actually allow signs of their aging to show on screen). Tom is celebrating his birthday and is soon meant to meet his wife Kristen (Monica Potter) for dinner at a fancy restaurant. He’s left work early to get ready and is surprised by a visit from his much younger mistress Hannah (Gabrielle Haugh).
Their tryst in the family pool quickly becomes a murder scene and the audience is at first led to believe Tom is the culprit as he attempts to both clean up the mess and hide her corpse from the guests attending a surprise party organized by his wife and their adult kids Alex (Tyler Lawrence Gray) and Rose (Brielle Barbusca). Although we’re firmly planted in Tom’s psyche as he re-hashes their afternoon delight and its grisly aftermath, the choppy flashbacks are careful not to reveal exactly who did the deed and why the woman was murdered.
Pressure from the party mounts. Partygoers keep getting too close to where Tom has stashed away the body. He’s harassed by his father-in-law William (Kevin Pollak, charmingly acerbic), who makes it clear that Tom and Kristen’s marriage has been on the rocks for awhile. Another unexpected visitor pushes Tom to his limits. As Tom spirals into a frantic drug-induced paranoia state, the film adds twist after twist, until the entire family has blood on their hands.
Gorman playfully switches perspective in one scene, pulling back from a claustrophobic ultra-close-up of Tom to a wide shot of Alex, Rose, and her boyfriend watching Tom as he pitifully stumbles around the backyard. It’s a refreshing reminder that not only are we watching a movie, but also Tom the character is so deep in his own world, that it’s like he’s in his own movie as well. It’s a pity, then, that Gorman’s direction isn’t always this razor sharp as there is a current of mordant humor throughout Williams’ script that could easily have made this whole affair a pitch-black comedy.
The same goes for the uneven characterization of the women. Haugh’s Hannah seems to exist solely to look hot in a bikini and spout red herring-laden dialogue. The always solid Potter adds a steely gravitas to what mostly amounts to a stock character in Kristen. I kept waiting for her to get a great monologue moment like she does in the similarly lurid thriller “Along Came a Spider.” Alas, it never comes. Rosie is similarly underwritten, reduced to a pastiche of Gen-Z stereotypes, although Barbusca does her best to overcome the trite material with some hilarious line readings.
By design the son Alex remains an aloof presence, looming largely in the periphery until a third act twist places him squarely in the center of the action. For his part Gray goes all in, delivering one feeble excuse after another for his rancid behavior with a perfect mixture of derangement and vulnerability. A cookie-cutter copy of his equally ordinary, yet completely self-obsessed father.
Not surprisingly, Prinze Jr., who served as an executive producer on the project, has the meatiest role, and he is truly fantastic as the desperate Tom. Unlike Burt Lancaster’s crestfallen suburban patriarch in “The Swimmer,” Tom is always presented as pathetic. In the opening sequence he asks his friend, “Am I a good man?” but it’s clear from the jump that he is absolutely not. The film never once props him up as aspirational, just sweaty and sad. Flustered, he’s always asking for five minutes so he can come up with a plan, but Tom’s the kind of zero who could be given a whole year and still wouldn’t come up with a good plan.
Tom’s eventual journey towards something resembling redemption is played a little too straight. One final bad decision to cap off a film full of bad decisions should be laced with dramatic irony, especially since it is a damning indictment of how white men’s rage, at any age, is often coddled and protected by those with the most power. It’s a stinger that would have been better served on a more preposterously pulpy platter. Instead, the film ends with a limp whimper. What could have been a deliciously dark satire, instead remains in the liminal space known as aggressively average.