"Swimming Pool offers something few other movies this summer can match: A dreamy, intoxicating sensuality." – Miami Herald
Sarah Morton is a famous British mystery author. Tired of London and seeking inspiration for her new novel, she accepts an offer from her publisher John Bosload to stay at his home in Luberon, in the South of France. It is the off-season, and Sarah finds that the beautiful country locale and unhurried pace is just the tonic for her--until late one night, when John's indol...
"Swimming Pool offers something few other movies this summer can match: A dreamy, intoxicating sensuality." – Miami Herald
Sarah Morton is a famous British mystery author. Tired of London and seeking inspiration for her new novel, she accepts an offer from her publisher John Bosload to stay at his home in Luberon, in the South of France. It is the off-season, and Sarah finds that the beautiful country locale and unhurried pace is just the tonic for her--until late one night, when John's indolent and insouciant French daughter Julie unexpectedly arrives. Sarah's prim and steely English reserve is jarred by Julie's reckless, sexually charged lifestyle, and their interactions set off an increasingly unsettling series of events.
"If you are to enjoy the film, you must savor every carefully composed image for itself and itself only, as if you were at an exhibition of paintings with a single theme, the sheer, sensuous pleasure of contemplating the interaction of human bodies with the eerie serenity of a swimming pool." – New York Observer
"Swimming Pool has the edgy chill of early Polanski." – Bob Campbell, Newark Star-Ledger
"It's summertime. It's the south of France. It's a French movie. Who said anything about clothes?
[...]
The disparity may seem a little overdrawn -- "Murder She Wrote" meets ''Girls Gone Wild'' -- but as the story takes shape, Mr. Ozon, Ms. Rampling and Ms. Sagnier complicate it in subtle and fascinating ways.
[...] ''Swimming Pool,'' Mr. Ozon's first English-language film (with a bit of French thrown in for local color), is simultaneously a thoroughly mannered, mischievously artificial confection and an acute piece of psychological realism. Whose psychology, and which reality, remains ambiguous even after the tart, delicious final twist. After that, the story itself seems to evaporate like the mist over the pool's luminous blue surface. The movie is alluringly insubstantial, like the light and air of the Luberon. You can't hold onto it, but it lingers in your senses and plays tricks with your memory." – A. O. Scott