A troubled college student convinces her friends to join her in a night of pool-hopping through their town.
Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Sam Hayes
Starring: Odessa A'zion, Mason Gooding, Ariel Winter, Tyler Alvarez, Francesca Noel, Michael Vlamis, Suzanne Cryer
One of the most over-used movie tropes is that of a troubled female protagonist submerging themselves in a body of water until they can no longer hold their breath (a cousin of the "male protagonist presses his hands against the wall of a shower and lets the water run down his back" cliché). In doing so they're supposed to be searching for brief clarity, a momentary escape from the world above the water line, but it's become so prevalent at this point that I immediately roll my eyes whenever it pops up.
Pools takes this trope and pushes it to the limit by having its female protagonist, Odessa A'zion's Kennedy, submerge herself in multiple bodies of water throughout the film. Kennedy is a once promising student who has gone off the rails since the death of her father a year ago. Her studies were so badly affected that she has stayed behind at her Chicago college to take summer classes. Trouble is, she never attends her classes, leading to her counsellor (Suzanne Cryer) issuing an ultimatum: if Kennedy doesn't show up for tomorrow's classes she'll be expelled.
Kennedy agrees to the terms, but decides that she needs one last big blowout, one final night of freedom. She is drawn to swimming pools, for reasons mentioned above, and wants to spend the night submerging herself in the pools of the various mansions that litter the college's leafy suburban surrounds. Kennedy has no friends however, so she gathers an impromptu bunch of companions to accompany her on her quest. There's the strait-laced Blake (Tyler Alvarez); jock Reed (Mason Gooding), a former student who continues to hang out on the college grounds; Shane (Francesca Noel), who has a crush on Reed; and Delaney (Ariel Winter), who was once Kennedy's best friend before Kennedy retreated into herself following her father's passing.
Writer/director Sam Hayes has admitted the influence of John Hughes on his feature, and it's not exactly subtle. Pools is essentially a mash-up of The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Like The Breakfast Club we have a group of youngsters who all roughly fall into stereotypes, and as the narrative develops we learn that they have more going on under the hood than they might immediately hint at. Like Ferris, Kennedy rounds these people up to join her on a quest to experience true freedom, but interestingly Kennedy has more in common with Ferris's insular best friend Cameron. Kennedy is cosplaying as Ferris when she's really Cameron.
Initially it seems as though Pools might be a Gen-Z riff on the Burt Lancaster vehicle The Swimmer, but that movie's pool-hopping plot proves merely the starting point here. Kennedy and co. quickly abandon this idea when they realise one of the homes is currently vacant. They decide to stick around and party in the home, learning a little about each other in the process.
Pools is perhaps overly faithful in its homage to Hughes by attempting to replicate the sort of goofy '80s comedy that plays as grating today. There is a subplot concerning Michael (Michael Vlamis), a hunky air conditioning repairman who loses his job after flirting with the wife of Dale (Raymond Fox), the owner of the mansion Kennedy and friends end up breaking into. As was often the case with Hughes' movies, the silliness of this subplot jars with the melancholy tone of the main narrative. For some reason, the movie is narrated by a cardboard standee of Dale (???), a quirky touch that falls flat and causes unnecessary confusion.
But when Hayes leans into the melancholy side of his film it becomes compelling. The young cast are instantly likeable, and we especially root for Kennedy to get her shit together. What's most interesting about Pools is that it isn't entirely clear what Kennedy's "shit" actually is. Like many college-aged kids, she has been thrust into a world of maturity and responsibility before she has figured herself out. It becomes clear that her ambiguous college studies were initially taken at the behest of keeping her father happy, but now that he's no longer around, what is the point of carrying on? We've seen a recent backlash against academia led by the reactionary Right, but Pools makes the case against college from a liberal perspective. It's refreshing to see a movie paint manual labour (in the form of Michael's air conditioning job) as something noble that can bring happiness to its practitioner.
In the movie's arresting final act, which pairs Kennedy and Michael via an admittedly hard-to-swallow plot turn, it makes a point that I've long held to be true - that your family and friends care more about your safety than your happiness. The latter often requires an element of risk, a gamble to achieve. If Pools' likely core audience of teenage sleepover attendees takes away this message it will have done its job.
Pools is on UK/ROI VOD from August 4th.
