In The Deep End, Tilda Swinton plays a throwback figure of a 1950s housewife. It’s not entirely surprising, considering the film is an adaptation of a low-profile noir novel from that era, but the anachronistic touches only add to the charming implausibility that seems to characterize the film.

In this rendition, Swinton’s Margaret Hall is a complacently capable mother who single handedly raises her three kids and manages her stubborn and disconnected father-in-law ,while her husband is abroad and unreachable as the captain of a Navy vessel somewhere in the North Atlantic.

Since Margaret unblinkingly assumes care of all domestic trials, she immediately takes up the matter when her 17-year-old son Beau gets in a drunken car accident on his way back from Reno with his 30-year-old sleazy gay lover. Her tendency to handle everything that comes her way, however, is stretched a little thin when the lover turns up dead on their stretch of beach on Lake Tahoe after a tussle with Beau. Without much hesitation, Margaret presumes her son’s involvement in the crime, and proceeds to diligently cover it up by dumping the body in the lake.

Presumption is a tricky business, and in life it can lead to all sorts of messydealings. In film, however, it’s merely fertile ground for dramatic tension, and The Deep End throws everything it has behind Margaret’s assumption that she needs to sink the body in order to save her son. But these are not even the moments of the film where plausibility its stretched to its thinnest, however. That comes soon after, as the movie takes sort of a Donna-Reed-meets-the-small-time-crime-circuit turn, and onto Margaret’s doorstep appears Alek, a thug who, as played by ER’s Goran Visnjic, is far too seductive to ever be sinister. He’s there to blackmail Margaret out of the $50,000 that the dead lover owed him, using a homemade porn tape of Beau as insurance.

As thrillers go, this one is meandering and languid instead of fast paced and racy. The slow drawl of the imagery is hardly boring, however, as the camera is full of gorgeous and loaded images of the crystal blue and distorting lens provided by the abundant water in the film-that of the lake, of the fish tanks, even of the kitchen sink. And the subtle and powerful acting of Swinton is so subdued and complex that she moves like a coiled spring. As her conflicted and very layered son, Jonathan Tucker is also worthy of a mention for turning out a character that is believable both as a mature young man and as a still-vulnerable child.

The flaws of the film are not to be found in the acting or the direction, but in the basic assumptions made by the script. Not only does the film fail to provide any conclusive reasons for much of the action, but it also assumes the audience will have more of a stake in that action. Visnjic’s character, for instance, shifts from threatening to supportive because, and this is where I begin to presume, he at some point falls for Margaret’s glazed vulnerability and her pot roast in the oven.

In the end, the film seems to hint at some emotionally wrenching scene, but it feels more akin to a “real shame” than a Great American Tragedy. It is only at these times when it reaches too high, though, that the film seems to fall short.

***

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