I usually hate when a horror movie opens with a sneak preview of its own climactic violence, then rewinds the clock back to when everything to was peaceful just a few days before. It’s almost always a sign of the film not trusting its audience to be patient for the payoff, a cowardly reassurance that things will escalate if you hang around long enough. I’ll make an exception for the recent Thai creature feature The Pool, however, where that sneak preview serves an entirely different function. The film opens with its hero dazed & dehydrated at the bottom of a drained pool, fighting off a killer crocodile with only a bucket and few splintered furniture legs. In this case, the preview plays as a useful warning to the audience about the film’s budgetary restrictions. The CGI crocodile looks absurdly, unfathomably cheap, as if our sun-damaged hero is fighting a 2D photograph of a croc clipped out of a magazine. Instead of promising mayhem to come, the film is just being honest about the limits of what it can deliver, making sure the audience is on board with its bargain bin CGI upfront before wasting our time with less pressing concerns like dialogue, theme, or plot.

In essence, The Pool is a bargain bin riff on The Shallows, in which a young couple is stranded in a drained swimming pool with a killer crocodile. Between The Shallows, Crawl, and 47 Meters Down, we’ve been gifted a few solid confined-space aquatic horrors in recent summers, which does put The Pool at a slight disadvantage considering the limited resources it’s competing with. It has no choice but to pave over its budgetary restrictions with a playful sense of humor, then, making sure the audience has a fun time even if not an extravagant one. In most of our hero’s attempts to escape the 6-meter concrete walls of his swimming pool prison, everything is just out of reach, amusingly so. A charger cord saves his phone from falling into the water just long enough for him to barely miss catching it; a Pizza Hut® delivery driver misses his calls for help because he’s briefly tethered to the drain by his wallet chain; a ladder lowered into the pool by strangers rolls away as he approaches it because it’s attached to a precarious stack of pipes. There are two major obstacles to survive in this picture: a cheaply rendered crocodile & an absurdist Rube Goldberg contraption designed specifically to keep him in place.

And then, just when you think The Pool is going to play everything for cheap laughs, it gets shockingly fucked up. Its flash-forward preview of the killer croc warns the audience of the film’s limited budget, but there’s no such accommodation for its wild shifts in tone. This is fun, upsetting trash that’s eager to push its limited scenario to its furthest extremes, alternating between slapstick gags & vicious cruelty without much notice. I will not spoil the shock value violence of its third act, so I’ll just report that I genuinely gasped once I got there. Weirdly, there’s also a thematic undertone to the film that suggests it might be Pro-Life propaganda. Otherwise goofball characters discuss in severe, worried tones about how “abortion is illegal, and also a sin”, and the killer croc herself only really lashes out to protect her eggs from being eaten by her fellow starved prisoners. I honestly don’t know what to make of that thematic swerve, nor do I know what to make of the film’s harsh shifts from broadly comedic schtick to nasty ultraviolence. All I can say is that I’m impressed that a film this cheap & this unassuming managed to surprise me at all, especially considering its reliance on a flash-forward prologue.

-Brandon Ledet