Shudder Saturday: The Pool (2018)

A creature feature that puts one man in an empty swimming pool that also happens to become a lair for a big mean crocodile, The Pool is a film that could have been a streamlined and slick thriller/horror movie. Could have been.

Although the first sentence has effectively summarised the movie, there's a bit more to it. You also get the hero's partner in trouble. You get a dog being a help or hindrance. And you get some backstory shown that fleshed out the two main characters and exactly where they are in their relationship.

There are things in The Pool that are easy to forgive, and things that aren't. Writer-director Ping Lumpraploeng has a number of credits to his name already, although I am not sure if any of his other movies are within the horror realm (a cursory glance doesn't show anything that stands out, concept-wise), and he handles the basics of the film-making techniques with a certain proficiency. There may be many moments in which the crocodile looks as if it has escaped from one of the very early Tomb Raider games, but it's kept as a very visible threat without always having to be shown in the kind of detailed way that highlights the wonky CGI.

Theeradej Wongpuapan is very good as Day, the man who somehow finds himself in this very dangerous situation, and Ratnamon Ratchiratham is equally good as Koi, although she doesn't have to do as much. The two of them being so good helps massively, however, especially in the scenes that decide to dwell on a sub-plot about a potential pregnancy and plans for the future (including whether or not to keep the baby).

Where things go wrong is in the plotting. Lumpraploeng seems determined to keep stacking all of the odds against our hero, which is fine, to a degree. Everything goes from bad to worse at such a fast and steady trajectory that it almost becomes comedic. It also allows for some moments to make viewers wince, one you can see coming as soon as you see some barbed wire hanging down from the edge of the pool. But it also allows for some moments that feel as if they go a bit too far, including one moment in the final act that had me almost throwing something at the screen and actually shouting aloud "fuck you, just fuck you". It's not just a mean-spirited way of adding more pain on to the main character, it's a genuinely cheap way to add an extra bit of nastiness to things and create a plot development that should have been less lazily planned out.

The simplicity of the premise still works in its favour, and The Pool excels when it is showing the leads making use of their very limited resources to avoid toothy death, but it's a shame that Lumpraploeng decided to pad the whole thing out with a number of unnecessary elements (the relationship stuff could have been jettisoned, along with a number of minor hurdles that crop up in between the bigger moments). It's an okay watch, for a 91-minute movie. It could have been a great film to recommend if it had pared down to about 80 minutes.

6/10

https://ko-fi.com/kevinmatthews