TALES OF REDEMPTION

Kathleen Norris on TALES OF REDEMPTION

I’ve been haunted by The Deep End ever since I saw it on its release in 2001. Much of this was due to Tilda Swinton’s performance as a put-upon mother who’s busy tending her three children and an aging father-in-law who’s on the edge of dementia while her husband, a captain in the U.S. Navy, is away at sea, She’s a bit like the mother Michelle Yeoh played in Everything Everywhere All at Once, an ordinary woman (or Everywoman) pushed to extremes. But Swinton’s character, Margaret, doesn’t have recourse to fantasy when her troubled teenaged son inadvertently causes blackmailers to target the family.

What lingered for me about that film is a remarkable transformation towards kindness in one of the blackmailers, Alek, movingly played by Croatian-American actor Goran Visnjic. By the time the harried Margaret asks him, “What kind of heartless man are you?” we’ve begun to suspect that the man has a heart after all. Witnessing Margaret with her children and helping her perform CPR on the father-in-law when he collapses, has done something to Alek, perhaps given him a glimpse of a family life he has never known but now believes is worth protecting. It’s an unexpected but welcome turn in what otherwise would have been an excellent but more predictable thriller.