Halloween, Part II

A movie doesn't need ghosts and goblins to be scary. This Halloween, may I suggest "The Deep End," starring Tilda Swinton?

This movie is maybe twenty years old. A beleaguered woman lives on Lake Tahoe with her children; her husband, a naval officer, is away on duty and more or less unreachable. The oldest kid is secretly gay, and he gets involved with a disreputable older man. A fight ensues; the man winds up dead. Tilda must cover up the death--and must wonder if her son is a murderer, and if it's possible/advisable to find out.

This movie is like a wicked treatise on situational irony--when an action has the direct opposite of its intended impact. We have certain ideas about family: Our children and our spouses will protect us. But, in "The Deep End," Tilda's husband is a kind of silent antagonist, intolerant toward homosexual people; Tilda's children are almost relentlessly horrible, treating their mother as a punching bag. For support, Tilda turns--more and more--toward the same man who is blackmailing her. A guy who should be the villain in the story actually seems to save Tilda's life.

This is really a scary movie, I insist. You watch while holding your breath; Tilda Swinton is so skillful, you worry that she might actually have a heart attack on camera, at any given moment. Good writing and good acting tend to involve a Divided Self: a person almost overwhelmed by pain, who still insists on going forward. This is what Swinton brings to every scene, and it's just with her eyes; you forget you're watching an artist, a person who did research and made choices before arriving on set.

I love this movie.

https://www.google.com/search?q=tilda+swinton+deep+end+trailer&oq=tilda+swinton+deep+end+trailer&aqs=chrome..69i57j0.4646j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

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