Contentar Best movie of this year hands down!

Animenter There are women in the film, but none has anything you could call a personality.

Jayden-Lee Thomson One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

Darin One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

mornerdc Everyone in this film behaves stupidly from the start, from the small child to the grandfather to the villains. It is actually painful to watch such a poorly constructed script performed by good people. Almost had to stop this film it was so bad. Hard to watch a film where every single premise, situation, and reaction introduced is unbelievable in every respect. The actors are entirely competent, but the situations, reactions to them, and the behaviors of the characters are just outrageously ridiculous and unbelievable. Technically competent: cinematography, sound, sets,casting all good...writing: TERRIBLE - more than a waste of time,actually unpleasant to watch.

Robert J. Maxwell Tilda Swinton's son, Jonathon Tucker, is a homosexual trumpet player about to enter college on a scholarship, but she knows nothing about his sexual proclivities. (I think; I missed the first few minutes.) Swinton's husband is a naval officer on an extended trip overseas. The family home is a comfortable dwelling on the shore of Lake Tahoe, on the Nevada side.A man approaches her, informs her of Tucker's sexual activities, and threatens to expose him unless she hands over fifty thousand dollars. Shove comes to push, the extortionist falls off the dock, lands on the upright flukes of an anchor, and is killed.The hysterical Swinton dumps his body in the lake, where it's promptly found by an unlucky fisherman. Swinton is then visited by still another blackmailer, a handsome young man, not unsympathetic. But the big boss behind the scam is pitiless and wants the whole boodle, which Swinton is unable to raise, due to the absence of her husband.Thereafter it gets twisted. The evil die, while the good flourish as the green bay tree.It would have been a good black-and-white B movie from Warners in the 1930s or 1940s -- blackmail scheme goes awry. What lifts it out of that particular genre are two things.The presence and the performance of Tilda Swinton, which is really quite good. Her features are idiosyncratic. Her rather ordinary face features these startlingly blue eyes topped by brows so pale that they make La Giocanda look like Salma Hayek. They're both piercing and terrified. And she's a fine actress, judging from this film, despite her being barely handsome enough to serve as romantic lead without a big do-over.The second thing is the location shooting at Lake Tahoe. It's immediately identifiable for where it is. Those granite rocks of the Sierra Nevada are unmistakable. But, with a little suspension of belief, it could be a fairy-tale Switzerland. But don't even think of living in Lake Tahoe. You couldn't afford a pup tent.It's worth seeing -- at least once.

evanston_dad A claustrophobic thriller about a woman who will go to any lengths to prevent her son from being implicated in the murder of his abusive lover.This is one of those movies in which a character digs herself deeper and deeper into a hole progressively more difficult to get out of, and it unspools with all the morbid fascination of a ten-car pileup. "The Deep End" was my introduction to the endlessly mesmerizing Tilda Swinton, in my opinion one of the best actresses working today. She received some award attention around the time of this film's release, but remained mostly obscure to the general public until fairly recently.Grade: A

robert-temple-1 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.