Led by GTH’s rising stars from the phenomenal Hormones The Series and directed by Sophon Sakdaphisit (Shutter, 2004 and Ladda Land, 2011), The Swimmers looks well set to be another of GTH’s successful and spooktacular movies, even threatening to bring more substance to the screen.

 

Two best friends and competitive swimmers Perth (Chutavuth “March” Pattarakampol) and Tan (Thanapob “Tor” Leeluttanakajorn) compete against each other for the university athlete admission quota. While Tan’s got the talent, Perth is all about ambition. Their silent rivalry intensifies when Perth falls in love with Tan’s girlfriend Ice (Supassra “Kao” Thanachat), who returns his feelings. But when Ice commits suicide by plummeting off the highest diving board onto the hard tiles of the school’s under-renovation swimming pool, weird things keep happening to Perth and everything starts to revolve around her death.

 

Branding itself as a horror film, The Swimmers utilizes the conventional tricks we’ve seen all too often, ranging from flickering lights to things breaking down, a computer playing a creepy video on its own, moving shadows, background movements, and blood-covered and unkempt ghosts—you name it. Without a linear plot, sometimes blurring the line between before and after Ice’s death, the storytelling can be confusing yet exciting. Playing on the audience’s expectations of a ghost film, the film offers a pleasant surpriseby taking a psychological turn.

 

This is best felt in the unexpectedly complex character of Perth, who plays innocent while his ambition goes into overdrive and leads him on a path of lies and betrayal. For this, he pays the price of being haunted by guilt that slowly eats away at his sense of reality. Portraying this heavy character falls on the shoulders of March, whose performance isn’t quite there for such a complex role. The other actors also fail to impress, with Tor’s Tan a rip-off of Hormones’ hot-tempered bad boy Phai, and Kao’s Ice more important dead and absent than alive on screen. The trio in swimming suits almost all the time is pure eye candy, though.

 

This love triangle drama gone wrong tackles real-life teenage issues such as unprotected sex and abortion, and portrays teenage sexual tension, jealousy, revenge and violence quite faithfully. As a ghost flick, The Swimmers is hardly original, falling for the usual trappings and only raising a few goose bumps. It fares better as a psychological thriller, despite its inconsistencies in grounding the characters’ motives and actions in reality, and overdoing the suspense. Although by no means original, The Swimmers does a decent job of diving into the dark depths of the human mind and the haunting and destructive power of guilt.