Not only is the acting incredible in The Deep End, the way it was filmed added a bit of spookiness to it. The Deep End stars Tilda Swinton (The War Zone) as Margaret Hall the mother of Beau (Johnathan Tucker, Sleepers) a teenage closet homosexual with a much older lover. Swinton’s portrayal of this troubled mother is an Oscar worthy performance. You can feel her anxiety and become tense as she suffers. How many actors can leap off the big screen and make you feel what their character is suffering. That is powerful acting. The direction was shared by Scott McGehee and David Siegel who had it filmed almost as low budget without outside distractions of too much music to set the mood or elaborate scenery. This gave the movie a feeling of desolation. The location was Lake Tahoe but not what we are accustomed to. The majority of the filming takes place at the Hall home right on the waters edge. What was a little disturbing was seeing Goran Visnjic the lovable Luca on ER as the blackmailing thug Alek Spera. Then I remembered long before we ever met Luca he was evil, pure evil in the film Practical Magic with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman.

The Deep End begins when Swinton an average looking thin woman is pounding on a door to what could be a bar. When she gets in she asks for Darby Reese (Josh Lucas, American Psycho). This man turns out to be the 30 year old lover her 17 year old son has been seeing. Darby runs this club and the reason she found out about him was her son crashed his car the other night with Darby in the passenger side they both had been drinking. She asked Darby to stop seeing her son. As Swinton is arriving home we learn from her other children that Beau was upset and went out on his rowboat. Darby called and let him know his mother paid him a visit.  When Beau returns home she confronts him and tells him that when she asked Darby to stop he asked for five thousand dollars to do so. Beau did not believe her. Later that evening Darby came to Beau window. Beau met him at the boathouse where they fought. Darby admitted to asking for money but he would have kept on seeing him. Beau was angry he would steal money from his mother. Beau left to go back in the house and Darby still grasping a piece of material from Beau’s torn shirt fell into the water when a dock post gave way. Early the next morning Beau’s mom was walking along the shore and found the dead Darby. He fell on the anchor and died accidentally but when Swinton discovered the fabric she thought Beau did this. Swinton put the deceased Darby in the rowboat and dumped the body in the lake. She then had to go back to get his keys to move Darby’s sports car with vanity plates from in front of her house. Later that day Visnjic paid her a visit to Mr. Hall. Mr. Hall is in the military and out to sea so he had to deal with Swinton. Visnjic who was in cahoots with Calie Nagel (Raymond J. Barry) attempted to blackmail Beau’s mother because in their possession was a video tape Darby made of Beau and himself making love for hours. Visnjic knew this would be of interest to the Tahoe sheriff’s office in the murder investigation of Darby Reece. We are then taken through the painful struggles of this mothers attempt to come up with this unreasonable amount of money for blackmailers, her father-in-laws untimely heart attack and keeping the information of her homosexual son from her husband who would not react well.

For a movie without big stars or a large budget this film is outstanding. The way it was filmed seemed to be another character in itself. The shots were so eerie. The loneliness and despair were so evident just with the camera shots. Unfortunately there was no advertising done outside of movie trailers at the theater to draw in the kind of audience that would have made this a successful movie. I gave The Deep End a nine on the About-Movies.com scale.

Last updated: Saturday, October 28, 2006 05:37:40 PM

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