Tag: trapped

The Pool

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Day (Theeradej Wongpuapan) wakes up. There’s a lot of blood. He’s at the bottom of a drained, six metres deep swimming pool with a crocodile advancing towards him. But how did he – and for that matter the crocodile – get there?

Flash back to six days earlier. Day and his girlfriend Koi (Ratnamon Ratchiratham) are working on a movie set. He looks after the swimming pool and as a bonus his dog Lucky has to heroically jump from the poolside over the water in the schedule’s very last shot. The dog leaps, the crew gets the shot, it’s a wrap, everyone’s happy. In fact, Day is so happy that when almost everyone else has gone, he dozes off on a lilo in the pool while its draining. When he wakes, the water level has gone down so far that he can’t get out. Somewhere on the ground nearby, a flier announces an escaped crocodile is on the loose.

Around this seemingly flimsy opening, going one day at a time up to seven days, director Lumpraploeng constructs an edge of the seat slice of narrative suspense which deserves a place in that pantheon of suspense thrillers which take place in small locations often with reduced numbers of characters. This pantheon includes:

Lifeboat (Alfred Hitchcock, 1944, in a lifeboat);
Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948, in one apartment);
Duel (Steven Spielberg, 1971, in a car pursued by a lorry);
Dead Calm (Philip Noyce, 1989, three people on two boats);
Cube (Vincenzo Natali, 1997, in, um, a cube);
Phone Booth (Joel Schumacher, 2002, in a phone booth);
Buried (Rodrigo Cortés, 2010, in a coffin);
Frozen, 2010, Adam Green, a ski lift);
Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg, 2012, in a stretch limo);
Locke (Steven Knight, 2013, in a car); and
Arctic (Joe Penna, 2018, in the Arctic following a plane crash).

None of those are what you might describe as creature features though, unless you include the brief sequence where a snake enters the coffin in Buried, the wolves on the ground below in Frozen or the bear in Arctic. But the crocodile in The Pool turns it into a full blown creature feature as well.

The trapped man in the pool’s obvious means of escape would be his girlfriend turning up and lowering a lifeline or ladder. She does indeed turn up, but then owing to a rapid-fire series of events, she quickly ends up injured, perhaps fatally, in the pool with him. Other possible ways out include a helicopter overhead, a drone, the latter’s owners descending into the pool to retrieve it and the lowering of a bamboo ladder at the poolside. There’s also a manhole cover in the middle of the pool, screwed down until our hero finds a way to remove the screws, leading to a small underground cylindrical service tunnel (shades of both Dr. No, Terence Young, 1963 and Alien, Riley Scott, 1979, the latter indubitably a creature feature, the former not so because the script cut out the giant squid Bond battles in the book) which might or might not provide a way out.

Then there’s the crocodile which following a run in with Lucky (in which we won’t tell you if the dog lives up to his name) the crocodile ends up on the floor of the swimming pool. And the fact that the hero is diabetic and his insulin shot is sitting ready in a syringe on a table beside the pool, beyond his reach.

The crocodile must be mostly CGI because otherwise at least two cast members (three if you include the dog) would have been unlikely to survive the shoot. This educated guess is based on the plethora of animation and computer technicians on the end credits, not on the croc itself which is pretty convincing on every level. The two main actors put everything they have into their performances too and the director brilliantly rachets up the tension throughout so that, as the piece proceeds to its conclusion, you’re thoroughly gripped.

While it’s hard to locate this film in specific Thai or wider East Asian culture, it shares a certain kinship with Thai action star Tony Jaa vehicle Ong Bak 2 The Beginning (Tony Jaa, 2008) which has a heart-stopping sequence with the hero fighting for his life in a flooded crocodile pit. The Pool is every bit as heart-stopping from start to finish. If no enterprising UK distributor has yet picked this up, then one of them really ought to do so.

The Pool showed at the The London East Asia Film Festival, in 2019, when this piece was originally written. On Shudder in July 2020.

Crowhurst

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

So you’ve seen The Mercy (James Marsh, 2018) – or perhaps after reading our three star review you passed. And now, a few weeks later, timed likewise to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of 1968’s Sunday Times Golden Globe round the world boat race, along comes Crowhurst, a second telling of the same historical episode. Should you bother with Crowhurst? The answer, whether or not you saw its higher-profile rival, is most emphatically yes.

It’s such a great story – British underdog and amateur sailor Donald Crowhurst enters the race hoping to win the prize money which will extricate him and his business from severe financial difficulty. He signs a deal with a backer that will destroy him if he doesn’t win. As competitors drop out, it looks as if he’ll make the fastest time. But his voyage is based on deceit – he’s not circumnavigated the world at all and his logbooks won’t stand the scrutiny a winner would receive. His boat turns up without him on board somewhere off the Cayman Islands. His diaries are there – but Crowhurst has disappeared, never to be seen again.

The other was the medium-sized feature with big-name stars and expansive locations. Rumley’s version – like its eponymous hero played with pluck by Justin Salinger – is the low budget outsider entry competing against impossible odds. Crowhurst comes with unfamiliar actors and is shot on land in England and at sea in the Bristol Channel doubling for vaster, international waters. (In something of a coup, the scenes in Crowhurst’s family home are shot in the real-life Crowhurst family home.) With that low price tag comes artistic freedom. No quarter is given to marketing demographics. Rumley goes for his own idiosyncratic take on events. His film is all the better for it.

Lacking the budget for exotic seascape locations, Rumley zeroes in on the inside of his protagonist’s head as impossible events conspire against Donald and he begins to fall apart. He imagines a live fish out of water trying to survive inside his cabin, on one occasion making a racket trapped inside his first aid box. There is ultimately no way out and with each closing loophole the images become increasingly fragmented and the photography more and more bleached.

Intermittent broadcast TV scenarios explain how one at a time his rivals are dropping out of the race, but they seem very distant and Crowhurst is about the trapped Donald, not them. So too with the other major players – wife Clare (Amy Laughton) and four kids, overbearing and grotesque press agent Rodney Hallworth (Christopher Hale), shrewd backer Stanley Best (Glyn Dilley) whose watertight contract Donald signed. All seem distant, as if in a dream. Or a nightmare. From which Crowhurst will never wake.

As the wide-open sea gives way to close in on the cabin, Donald’s surroundings become increasingly claustrophobic. He believes himself transcendent in his delusion. He becomes convinced he can control everything. A scribbling biro gouges a hole in a map. Eventually, he utters the last words from his diary: “It is finished. It is finished. It is… The Mercy.” In the film of that name, those lines seem vague, lost. In Crowhurst, they represent the full blown end of an irrevocable descent into madness and, by implication, death.

Threaded through this terrible downward trajectory are songs familiar to every Englishman or woman: Land Of Hope And Glory, Silent Night, God Save The Queen. It elicits subliminal nationalist, Christian and monarchist songs delivered as dirges, widespread inculcated beliefs reduced to superficial nursery rhymes; an entire national psyche rendered redundant. These days, the world has moved on.

Crowhurst is out in the UK in March. Out on VoD in October.