THE GIRL IN THE POOL
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The Girl in the Pool (2024) Review
- Horror Film ReviewsThriller
Darren Gaskell- January 22, 2025
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- 7 minutes read
“Am I a good person?” asks middle management, middle-aged family man Thomas (Freddie Prinze Jr.) of himself in a mirror. Well, earlier that day, he’d been enjoying himself with mistress Hannah (Gabrielle Haugh) right up to the point where she died in his pool and he subsequently had to hide the body. Given that information, you can make up your own mind as to just how good a person Thomas is. Any scheme to get rid of the aforementioned corpse, however, is thrown into turmoil as a load of folks show up at the house unannounced for his surprise birthday party and it seems that almost everyone has something to hide, even if it’s not a recently deceased bit on the side.
If Dakota Gorman’s thriller sounds a touch ludicrous, you would not be wrong. From the start, Thomas acts so weird it’s amazing that no one questions him more than they do as regards his strange behaviour, as he zones out one moment before becoming super twitchy the next. Thomas’ deteriorating psychological state is not helped by father-in-law William (a severely underused Kevin Pollak) ignoring the memo about the Many Happy Returns vibe and instead making it crystal clear that his daughter Kristen (Monica Potter) has married way beneath her.
Fans of escalating nightmare situations will enjoy the various teases of the first act before the plot lurches off into murder mystery territory, presenting a list of possible suspects without really providing any motivation as to why they might want to off Hannah who, in flashback, has dropped more than a hint of the potentially problematic. She cuddles a pillow on the marital bed, tries on some jewellery, rips a random outfit that’s hanging up in the wardrobe and then applies some of Kristen’s lippy to plant a kiss on the mirror. Oh, she’s a keeper.
Considering Thomas has opted for quick and convenient in terms of dumping Hannah, very few people come close to discovering the contents of a storage box which is obviously lemon fresh throughout and staves off all of that putrefaction nonsense. Like the various stories Thomas spins across the piece to buy himself some time, things don’t stack up. Anyone with half a brain would join the dots and the jig would be up. However, no one in this screenplay possesses the required percentage of grey matter to raise much beyond the merest suspicion about our main character perhaps not being entirely on the level.
Beyond Freddie Prinze Jr., who helps himself to the bulk of the screen time and plays it with the heightened, slightly soapy emotion something this daft deserves, no one else gets much of a look in other than Potter, who makes the most of a role which requires her to do almost nothing other than look disapprovingly at her spouse. A late in the day reveal shows her to be the smartest one at the party but the bar for that hasn’t exactly been set high, let’s be honest.
Elsewhere, Haugh is required to look good in a bikini, whether she’s wandering around her borrowed squeeze’s abode or swimming around in close-ups that could be classed as loving or a bit dodgy depending on your viewpoint. The movie’s view of female characters in general is not especially edifying, case in point being Thomas and Kristen’s daughter Rose (Brielle Barbusca), a walking set of Gen Z cliches who needs to be the change she wants to see in the world. I know this because one of her lines is “I need to be the change I want to see in the world.”
And yet, despite the fact that this is a silly movie full of dumb characters who you would cross the street to avoid if you saw them heading your way in real life, The Girl In The Pool remains eminently watchable, if only to see how it all pans out for a man with a plan and a repeated mantra of “I’m gonna fix this” who generally has no plan and would struggle to fix anything. By the last twenty minutes, the story is revelling in just how preposterous it’s become and decides to lean into the comedy it was always threating to transform into, leading to a twist which probably won’t take you by surprise, then serving up a birthday speech about how to live your life in the best way possible and why it’s important to protect your family. All of that homespun philosophy is a bit rich given that the person giving the speech has been covering up a possible murder and has cheated on his missus.
As a premise, The Girl In The Pool contains more than enough logical lapses for the pernickety among us to list all the ways Thomas would have ended up attempting to explain himself to local law enforcement about twenty minutes in but, if you accept that realism will not be the movie’s strong suit and just go with it, there is enjoyment to be had here. The whodunit element doesn’t really go anywhere and, if anything, gets in the way of sinking Thomas deeper and deeper into his predicament so we don’t see Prinze Jr. squirm as much as this type of tale demands. Still, that saves us more of him talking to his reflection. You, like me, may want his reflection to tell him to shut the hell up and sort his life out.
I’m aware that I’m making this sound like a film that’s so bad it’s actually good but The Girl In The Pool doesn’t belong in that arena. It’s glossy, it’s reasonably well directed, it rattles along (save for a couple of redundant flashbacks) and the presence of seasoned performers such as Potter and Pollak mean that it’s never going to be a complete waste of time. For me, I think that it would have been far more enjoyable if it had gone fully bonkers once the set-up had been established. As it is, the finished product is too frivolous to work as a thrill ride but not wacky enough to be a brain off, popcorn and beer classic. Nice to see its star embracing the grey, though, even though he’s a little too toned and chiselled to be a true everyman.
| Movie Rating: |
The Girl in the Pool trailer
Tags:Freddie Prinze Jr. The Girl in the Pool
Darren Gaskell
Darren is a writing machine, producing content for a range of channels. You can catch more of his content at The Strange Colour Of Deej’s Reviews and The Horrocist. You can also follow him on Twitter.
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