Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on September 6, 2002, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Like FearDotCom, Swimfan is a low-budget studio thriller that’s being tossed into the late August/early September dead zone, and whose title is an Internet reference (“Swimfan” is the villain’s e-mail moniker). But unlike FearDotCom, which got ambitious with its atmospherics and descended into thorough incoherence, Swimfan tells a straightforward story in a completely rote and generic manner. This is more than a teenage variation on Fatal Attraction; it practically is Fatal Attraction, right down to a scene in which the disturbed, heartsick antagonist listens mournfully to classical music. Michael Douglas, the Attraction star whose Furthur Films co-produced Swimfan, has some explaining to do.
The junior femme fatale in question is Madison Bell (whose name, if you want to give the filmmakers credit for such an arcane reference, might be a homage to Doctor Sleep author Madison Smartt Bell). Played by Traffic’s Erika Christensen, she’s a new arrival at a New Jersey high school who immediately sets her seductive sights on swim team star Ben Cronin (Jesse Bradford). He’s already attached, but quickly falls for Madison’s charms, perhaps because his girlfriend Amy (Shiri Appleby) is something of a drip who’s defined entirely by her devotion to Ben. He and Madison have a steamy swimming-pool encounter (though not so hot that it jeopardizes the PG-13 rating), but he thinks it was just a fling and she takes it much more seriously, and…
And anyone with any familiarity with the genre will be able to predict exactly what will follow, scene for scene. What’s worse, there are no interesting psychological motivations behind what happens—everything occurs because the conventions of the hell-hath-no-fury genre have proscribed them. We’re told that Ben has a troubled past, but writers Charles Bohl and Philip Schneider never bother to suggest the possibility that he’s actually falling back into dangerous ways, or dare to imply that he might be genuinely attracted to Madison. It’s just a handy plot device that makes it easier for Madison to frame Ben for bad deeds. This kind of convenience (sometimes wedded to implausibility and clumsy foreshadowing) is rife throughout the movie, right down to a climax that depends on the fact that Ben is wearing the same pair of pants he did in one of the first scenes.
John Polson’s direction is competent enough, and he does keep the story moving (not difficult when the movie’s been hacked down to 80 minutes plus credits), but he doesn’t do much that’s interesting with the widescreen frame. His attempts at edgy style don’t come off; toward the third act, he decides to try the color-draining bleach-bypass look, evidently ’cause it worked so well in Se7en, then just as randomly abandons it. And in a few scenes, he drops in snippets of alternate takes that might have been intended to echo Madison’s fractured psyche, but instead suggest that the editor either lost some film trims or was the victim of a malfunctioning Avid system.
Of the young cast, Christensen comes off the best, bringing genuine intensity to a role informed more by standard screen madness than genuinely thought-through pathology. Bradford does what he can with a character who lacks dimension and, as the story goes on, common sense; when, late in the movie, Madison sends Ben a page reading, “Feel like a dip?”, you can be forgiven for thinking she’s not talking about swimming. The charming Appleby is wasted in a thankless role, with her big dramatic moment (Amy’s discovery of Ben’s indiscretion, and their subsequent confrontation) shortchanged as Polson stages most of it at a distance, with nothing but a generic rock song on the soundtrack. Appleby doesn’t even get an Anne Archer moment of payback at the climax—but if the makers of Swimfan were trying to distinguish themselves from Fatal Attraction this way, the gesture is far too little, far too late.
