What to watch: Swimming Home

There's a lot to unpack with Swimming Home - Justin Anderson's film adaptation of the novel by Deborah Levy.

I haven't read the novel, so I was hitting this cold - unsure what to expect.

At the centre of the story is the marriage of Joe (Christopher Abbott) and Isabel (Mackenzie Davis). Joe is a writer and Isabel is a journalist - a war correspondent. They're on an extended holiday somewhere in Greece, with their daughter, Nina (Freya Hannan-Mills).

Returning to their villa, they find a naked woman floating in their pool - Kitti (Ariane Labed). Isabel invites Kitti to stay with them. Everything seems to unravel from there.

While the simmering sexual tension holds your attention, and there's a lot of visual in the film, the end result is quite confusing with a lot of unanswered questions that seem beyond explanation.

Maybe this would all make more sense if you've read the book. For me, it was really unclear as to what was happening and what any of it meant.

A central theme was Joe's trauma - he became a refugee during the Bosnian war, his parents were killed.

Kitti seems to be an avatar for some kind of primal force - possibly death.

There's a lot of symbolism and surreal flourishes that distance us from the characters and their emotions.

Everything is designed to make us feel the discordance at the centre of this family, of this place, of this time. Nothing is quite right.

It's possible that the entire thing is a Barton Fink-esque meditation on writer's block.

What's surprising is the lack of sex in the film. There's heat, there's nudity, but no fucking - everyone seems too depressed to actually connect with the sexual energy that's apparently all around them.

But it is all interesting to watch, and we get lots of stunningly beautiful naked men displayed across a version of Limanakia beach, so there's that.