By Keri O’Shea
In horror, certain things seem to go together very nicely, and anyone with even a passing interest in the genre could work out that you Don’t Go Into The Woods if you know what’s good for you; as certainly as you’d lose all of your marbles once a mere half an hour out of sight of the main road, you’d also apparently be throwing yourself into the path of someone or something very sinister to boot, in all likelihood at least. So; woodland, dark water, madness and the supernatural – these are all things which (naturally) figure in new Dutch horror yarn The Pool (De Poel). There’s another recognisable horror at the film’s heart, too: camping.
Two families – putting something of a brave face on a spate of recent redundancies and other domestic trials – are being led out on a camping holiday in the back of beyond, snipping their way through wire fences and ignoring No Trespassing signs to get to the perfect spot of Lennaert’s (Gijs Scholten van Aschat) choosing. Eventually, they find a pleasant place near a small lake, and set up camp there. The minor adversities of finding the place soon pass, and Lennaert, wife Sylke, sons Jan and Marco, a former colleague of Lennaert’s called Rob and his daughter Emilie seem to be having a good time. Not for long, though; there seems to be something odd about the locale, with all of their food quickly rotting or being thrown around. More (or maybe less) strangely, some of the men start having strange visions of a female entity. Could this relate to Rob’s fireside story about the mysterious disappearances historically associated with this woodland…this woodland they’ve bloody chosen to camp in…and the myths of odd beings therein?
Textbook bad choices aside, it’s not all that clear. I thought that the mention of old legends was a big plot marker we were meant to hold onto, but the resolution of just who or what is bothering the men doesn’t quite tally with that, especially given the film’s ending. Via the use of flashbacks to the deep and distant past, it’s intimated that we’re dealing with something else entirely, and this is one of the gripes I have with The Pool – it badly needed to trim some of its sequences to afford us more plot exposition, at least before the end credits rolled. At first, its slow-burn creep factor works very much in its favour: the film is at its best before the mid-way mark, when its economical use of supernatural elements make for a solid build-up. When this continues, particularly when I found myself growing in frustration when the ‘try to leave, end up back at the camp’ motif is repeated numerous times, I thought that the solid build needed to be developed more strongly. The Pool feels like a fleshed-out Blair Witch in many respects, with its supernatural hints, its disorientating trip through the woods and the breakdown of its characters’ relationships – though, it suffers by this similarity, as it struggles to come out with a strong conclusion of its own.
In fact, the more I think of it, the more I feel like The Pool falls into two halves, with the latter failing to sustain the good qualities of the first. There are many good qualities here: for starters, it begins as a very character-driven movie, with a group of people who come across and broadly believable and likeable, and plenty of snappy dialogue between them which helps to establish this. The fact that we end up with two likeable families distracts the eye from the standard horror film setting and certain other tropes, because we want to see what’ll happen to the people involved, and we even have some light relief in the form of jokes which land nicely. However, as the relationship between them all comes under pressure, the dialogue begins to take the strain as much as the claustrophobic setting does: those believable human elements, whilst certainly intended to come apart at the seams, just disappear altogether. Add to this the awful presentiment that you are simply waiting for everyone to snuff it and you begin to miss the early promise of the film’s first half.
I was surprised to see that the director of The Pool (also one of its writers) was one of the writers of last year’s massively entertaining Frankenstein’s Army; if nothing else, this shows that he’s a guy capable of tremendous tonal shifts in his work, and as The Pool is his first feature film, there’s no reason why he’s not going to go on and develop more strengths than weaknesses. Ultimately, the weaknesses stack up here, but the number of effective creepy moments in the film’s earliest scenes do show potential.