June,
Annie, and Isa are three half-sisters sharing a common mother. Since they are
all roughly the same generation, it is easy to conclude their childhood was
somewhat chaotic. When their hippy dippy mother meets an untimely end through a
diving misadventure, they are brought to together for an awkward reunion. Either
supernatural forces or mortal madness (or both) will further complicate the
process in Sarah Adina Smith’s Midnight
Swim (trailer
here),
which opens this Friday in New York.
Dr.
Amelia Brooks’ home is nestled right on seemingly placid Spirit Lake.
Supposedly, it is so deep, divers have never reached the bottom. One day,
Brooks went down to explore its depths and never resurfaced. According to
legend, there is ample precedent for such tragedy. The locals tell of the Seven
Sisters who all drowned as each jumped in to save their proceeding siblings.
On
their first night, the half-sisters host their old school chum Josh, who is now
an eligible single dad. After enough wine, he leads them in a séance trying to
raise the spirits of the Seven Sisters. At the time, nothing happens, but
strange incidents soon begin piling up. Dead birds start littering the grounds
and mysterious time-lapse footage appears on June’s digital camera. She had
been documenting their homecoming for some sort of hipster documentary and
denies any involvement with the eerie sequences. However, there is something a
little off about June.
Of
course, it is hard to judge the half-sisters’ degrees of dysfunctionality. None
of them seems all that together—and for good reason. As we know from their
nostalgic lip-synching, they were raised on the happy platitudes of the New
Seekers’ “Free to Be You and Me.” Since then, they have learned the world is
not a place where horses run free. Nor does it revolve around their
self-esteem.
Smith
plays it coy, giving viewers just enough reason to maintain their supernatural
suspicions. The legend of the Seven Sisters is particularly compelling,
especially when retold by Shirley Venard playing a local amateur folklorist. It
feels like the kind of place-specific urban legends every kid grows up with,
while holding obvious resonance for the characters. Wisely, Smith is not
slavishly beholden to the “found footage” aesthetic. There are times when we
completely forget June (or someone or something) must be filming what we are
seeing, but it would not have betrayed her Spartan approach to throw the audience
a few more ambiguously paranormal bones.
The
perfectly cast Beth Grant is terrifyingly crunchy granola as Dr. Brooks, seen
in home movies and the like. Ross Partridge is also surprisingly engaging as
Josh, despite the film’s very female-centric perspective. Yet strangely, the
three co-leads never create strongly differentiated identities for the three
half-sisters. Perhaps that is a function of their shared problematic
upbringing. Could it be they are actually not separate entities unto
themselves, but are in fact the personification of the splinters of a fractured
identity? That seems unlikely in the dramatic context of the film, but it
sounds cool.
