The SwimmerMovies like The Swimmer
- Key Features:
- Existentialism, Suburban life, Midlife crisis, Social commentary, Loss of innocence, Surrealism, Swimming, Journey, Mortality, Disillusionment, Alcoholism
- Tone:
- serious, poetic, stylized
- Target Audience:
- Fans of art house films, Viewers interested in existential themes, Audiences seeking thought-provoking narratives, People who appreciate symbolic storytelling
- Emotional Arc:
- Confidence → Confusion → Despair
The Swimmer

A man spends a summer day swimming home via all the pools in his quiet suburban neighborhood.
The Swimmer
Set in a magnificent villa near a sun-drenched St. Tropez, lovers Jean-Paul and Marianne are spending a happy, lazy summer holiday. Their only concern is to gratify their mutual passion - until the day when Marianne invites her former lover and his beautiful teenage daughter to spend a few days with them. From the first moment, a certain uneasiness and tension begin to develop between the four, which soon escalates in a dangerous love-game.

A psychiatrist faces his past, present and future when he finds himself involved in the treatment of a young man recently released from prison for a murder committed when the boy was just 11 years old.

Forced into early retirement by a degenerative illness, former baseball player Ray Waller moves into a new house with his wife and two children. He hopes that the backyard swimming pool will be fun for the kids and provide physical therapy for himself. However, a dark secret from the home's past soon unleashes a malevolent force that drags the family into the depths of inescapable terror.

Darren Barrenman, an unwavering optimist and native Angeleno, spends his days looking after the pool of the Tahitian Tiki apartment block and fighting to make his hometown a better place to live.

A man who is suffering a mid-life crisis finds new meaning in his life as part of an all-male, middle-aged, amateur synchronised swimming team.

A British crime novelist travels to her publisher's upmarket summer house in Southern France to seek solitude in order to work on her next book. However, the unexpected arrival of the publisher's daughter induces complications and a subsequent crime.

A group of suburban teenagers try to support each other through the difficult task of becoming adults.

A young man develops severe neck pain after swimming in a polluted river for a movie shoot, but nobody can provide him any relief.

After falling pregnant to her boyfriend's best friend, a young woman commits suicide. She returns to haunt her unborn child's father while her friend seeks revenge on the person who drove her to her fate.

A high school swim champion with a troubled past enrolls in the U.S. Coast Guard's 'A' School, where legendary rescue swimmer Ben Randall teaches him some hard lessons about loss, love, and self-sacrifice.

A former valedictorian quits her reporter job in New York and returns to the place she last felt happy: her childhood home in Connecticut. She gets work as a lifeguard and starts a dangerous relationship with a troubled teenager.

Guy is a young film executive who's willing to do whatever it takes to make it in Hollywood. He begins working for famed producer Buddy Ackerman, a domineering, manipulative, coldhearted boss. When Guy also finds out that his cynical girlfriend, Dawn, has been using sex as a career move, he reaches his limit. Guy decides to exact revenge on Buddy by kidnapping him and subjecting him to cruel and unusual punishment.

Coach Jim Ellis shocks the community and changes lives when, aided by a local janitor, he sets out to form Philadelphia's first black swim team. But the odds are against them as they battle rigid rules, racism and more.

A high school student becomes convinced that the world is lost to evil and begins to challenge the morals and beliefs of the adults surrounding him.

40-year-old Bertrand has been suffering from depression for the last two years and is barely able to keep his head above water. Despite the medication he gulps down all day, every day, and his wife's encouragement, he is unable to find any meaning in his life. Curiously, he will end up finding this sense of purpose at the swimming pool, by joining an all-male synchronised swimming team.

Through his work at a morgue, an incarcerated young man trying to build a new life starts to come to terms with the crime he committed.

Rubens is a carefree, charismatic swimming instructor who finds himself accused of displaying inappropriate affection toward one of his students by the boy's mother. Other parents and colleagues are only too eager to condemn him.

From war-torn Syria to the 2016 Rio Olympics, two young sisters embark on a risky voyage, putting their hearts and their swimming skills to heroic use.

When a group of trespassing seniors swim in a pool containing alien cocoons, they find themselves energized with youthful vigor.

A pool boy and a gardener turn an empty mansion into a home for women who belong to the world's oldest profession.

Young elite swimmer Claire is sent to Australia to coach a boys swimming team, where she must overcome an old rival and a secret fear to save the swimming camp from closing.

International students at an elite Prague school are stalked and murdered by a masked killer while holding a party in an abandoned water park.

When secretive new neighbors move in next door, suburbanite Ray Peterson and his friends let their paranoia get the best of them as they start to suspect the newcomers of evildoings and commence an investigation. But it's hardly how Ray, who much prefers drinking beer, reading his newspaper and watching a ball game on the tube expected to spend his vacation.

The surreal tale of an unassuming man who is accused of a never-specified crime and shambles through bizarre encounters to escape this nightmare.

Beverly Hills couple Barbara and Dave Whiteman find their lives altered by the arrival of a vagrant who tries to drown himself in their swimming pool.

An unlikely friendship between two neighbors becomes an unexpectedly emotional journey when the younger man is diagnosed with terminal cancer.

After nearly drowning in a lake, a young girl develops an abnormal fear of water and is plagued by visions of a mysterious dark figure. A year later, in an attempt to cure her phobia and visions, her skeptical friends stage a séance and subject her to a bathtub experiment, unwittingly summoning the dark figure into the world.

Mel Edison has just lost his job after many years and now has to cope with being unemployed at middle age during an intense NYC heat wave.

Harper is brought to Louisiana to investigate an attempted blackmail scheme. He soon finds out that it involves an old flame of his and her daughter. He eventually finds himself caught in a power struggle between the matriarch of the family and a greedy oil baron, who wants their property. Poor Harper! Things are not as straight-forward as they initially appeared.

A man on the verge of a promotion takes a mysterious hallucinogenic drug that begins to tear down his reality and expose his life for what it really is.

A simple-minded gardener named Chance has spent all his life in the Washington D.C. house of an old man. When the man dies, Chance is put out on the street with no knowledge of the world except what he has learned from television.

Athlete Diana Nyad sets out at 60 to achieve a nearly impossible lifelong dream: to swim from Cuba to Florida across more than 100 miles of open ocean.

Seemingly mild-mannered Henry Morrison has just murdered his entire family. After adopting a new identity and skipping town, he begins building a new relationship with a widow and her teenage daughter. However, he soon begins struggling to hide his true identity and maintain a grip on reality.

Waverly thought she had her future figured out: she’d start her medical residency in Toronto after a summer visit to her parents in Taipei. When her plans suddenly change, she makes an impulsive detour to a small Canadian town where she meets local lifeguard Blake. After he saves her from nearly drowning at a beach party, Blake offers to teach Waverly to swim, and as the lessons continue, the two unexpectedly find themselves falling in love.

Wendell Lawson has only six months to live. Not wanting to endure his last few months of life waiting for the end, he decides to take matters into his own hands and enlists the help of a delusional mental patient to help him commit suicide.

One morning, Louise, 45, is suddenly unable to step out of her car. Sweats, anxieties, palpitations... she is having an inexplicable panic attack. She is tetanized and simply cannot set foot outside.

A young American woman traveling through Italy finds herself in a strange Mediterranean villa where nothing seems quite right.

After a serious sport accident in a swimming pool, Ben, now an incomplete quadriplegic, arrives in a rehabilitation center. He meets with other handicapped persons (tetraplegics, paraplegics, traumatized crania), all victims of accidents, as well as a handicapped since his early childhood. They go through impotence, despair and resignation, with their daily struggle to learn how to move a finger or to hold a fork. Some of them slowly find a little mobility while others receive the verdict of the handicap for life. Despite everything, hope and friendship help them endure their difficulties.

The story of a middle-aged woman with small children whose life is shaken up when two free-spirited twenty-somethings move in across the street.

Lester Burnham, a depressed suburban father in a mid-life crisis, decides to turn his hectic life around after developing an infatuation with his daughter's attractive friend.

Set in Los Angeles in 1962, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, is the story of a British college professor who dwells on the past and cannot see his future. We follow him through a single day, where a series of events and encounters ultimately lead him to decide if there is a meaning to life after the death of his long time partner, Jim.

Friends, family, and lovers struggle to find love, forgiveness, and meaning in an almost war-torn world riddled with comedy and pathos.

Eight-year-old Cody is spending the summer in an unfamiliar setting with his mom Kathy. Though he can't relate to the neighbourhood kids, things take an unexpected turn when he develops an unusual friendship with grouchy old Del from next door.

A lifeguard tries by all means to keep his home, an open-air swimming pool, from being closed.

While staying at an isolated island resort, James and Em are enjoying a perfect vacation of pristine beaches, exceptional staff, and soaking up the sun. But guided by the seductive and mysterious Gabi, they venture outside the resort grounds and find themselves in a culture filled with violence, hedonism, and untold horror. A tragic accident leaves them facing a zero tolerance policy for crime: either you'll be executed, or, if you’re rich enough to afford it, you can watch yourself die instead.

A middle-aged man in a stagnant marriage, finds his life upended when an attractive young woman and her seemingly abusive husband move in next door.

Apartment building superintendent Cleveland Heep rescues what he thinks is a young woman from the pool he maintains. When he discovers that she is actually a character from a bedtime story who is trying to make the journey back to her home, he works with his tenants to protect his new friend from the creatures that are determined to keep her in our world.

A restless photographer leaves her family to "find herself" and takes up deep-sea diving.

A well-to-do husband who allows his wife to have affairs in order to avoid a divorce becomes a prime suspect in the disappearance of her lovers.

A retired pool hustler is forced to pick up the stick again when his brother starts a game he can't finish.

Ben Cronin has it all: the admiration of his many friends, a terrific girlfriend, and he's on the fast-track to an athletic scholarship. Ben's rock-solid, promising future and romance are turned upside-down with the arrival of Madison Bell. Madison, the new girl in town, quickly sets her sights on the impressionable Ben. While their first few meetings are innocent enough, the obsessive and seductive Madison wants more ... much more.

An awkward, unemployed man who can talk to the dead teams up with a rebellious bartender to find the vengeful ghost that's been terrorizing their town.

Hugo Pool is a quirky tale of a Los Angeles pool cleaner who falls in love with a young man dying of Lou Gerhig's Disease.

A family gets trapped in their storm flooded vacation rental, tries to escape from a hungry shark that made it's way into the house.

When a deadly airborne virus threatens to wipe out the northeastern United States, teacher Elliot Moore and his wife Alma flee from contaminated cities into the countryside in a fight to discover the truth. Is it terrorism, the accidental release of some toxic military bio weapon -- or something even more sinister?

Though a childhood bout with polio left him dependent on an iron lung, Mark O'Brien maintains a career as a journalist and poet. A writing assignment dealing with sex and the disabled piques Mark's curiosity, and he decides to investigate the possibility of experiencing sex himself. When his overtures toward a caregiver scare her away, he books an appointment with sex surrogate Cheryl Cohen-Greene to lose his virginity.

School's out and 13-year-old Walter has lost his father. In his seemingly aimless wanderings around the Roman coast, a fascinating and mysterious place catches his eye: an abandoned villa with a huge, murky swimming pool. But the villa is not unguarded...

A wheelchair-bound photographer spies on his neighbors from his apartment window and becomes convinced one of them has committed murder.

A disillusioned college graduate finds himself torn between his older lover and her daughter.

Henry Poole abandons his fiancée and family business to spend what he believes are his remaining days alone. The discovery of a 'miracle' by a nosy neighbor ruptures his solitude and restores his faith in life.

Inspired by true events, Olympic swimmer Harry Melchior defects from East Germany in the 1960s and hatches a daring plot to help his sister and others flee East Berlin through a 145-yard underground tunnel.

In downtown Manhattan, twentysomething Allie, whose father is not around and whose mother is institutionalized, is a big Charlie Parker fan. He almost subconsciously searches for meaning in his life and meets some idiosyncratic characters along the way.

Three New York businessmen decide to take a "Wild West" vacation that turns out not to be the relaxing vacation they had envisioned.

Poet/lecturer Charles Serking awakens from his alcoholic haze long enough to take a bus back to L.A. and plunge into an orgy of drink and sexual depravity.

Depressed Alain Leroy leaves the clinic where he was detoxified. He meets friends, acquaintances and women, trying to find a reason to continue living.

An insurance salesman begins to suspect that his whole life is actually some sort of reality TV show.

Man was made to be happy for simple reasons and unhappy for even simpler ones – just as he is born for simple reasons and dies for even simpler ones... Isa and Bahar are two lonely figures dragged through the ever-changing climate of their inner selves in pursuit of a happiness that no longer belongs to them.

One man's quiet suburban life takes a sickening lurch for the worse when a young couple move into the deserted house next door. From the word go it is obvious these are not the quiet professional types who *should* be living in such a nice street. As more and more unbelievable events unfold, our hero starts to question his own sanity... and those of his family.

Meursault is a man who feels utterly isolated from everyone and everything around him. This alienation results in sudden, inexplicable bursts of violence, culminating in murder.

Follows the journey of a 90-year-old atheist and the quirky characters that inhabit his off-the-map desert town. He finds himself at the precipice of life, thrust into a journey of self-exploration.

Indifferent to the notion of inheriting his father's estate, a restless, aging New Yorker passes time with his friends in games of mock sincerity, irreverence, and recreational cruelty towards those around them.

Arlo accepts what seems to him to be a dream promotion to Idaho. He soon discovers, however, that moving has its own share of problems.

Frank, a retired Irish seaman, and Walter, a retired Cuban barber, are two lonely old men trapped in the emptiness of their own lives. When they meet in a park Frank is able to start a conversation after several attempts. They begin to spend time together and become friends. But because of their different characters they often quarrel with each other and finally seperate after Frank misbehaves to Walter's friend Elaine.

A troubled young woman becomes obsessed with her mysterious new neighbor, who bears a striking resemblance to the girl's dead mother.

An aging hairdresser escapes his nursing home to embark on an odyssey across his small town to style a dead woman's hair for her funeral, rediscovering his sparkle along the way.

Unable to cope with a recent personal tragedy, LA's top celebrity shrink turns into a pothead with no concern for his appearance and a creeping sense of his inability to help his patients.

Eight Italian politicians from the communist party gather on a terrace in Rome for a get-together. They discuss about their past, present and future.

Suburban dad Craig falls hard for his charismatic new neighbor Austin, and his attempts to make an adult male friend threatens to ruin both of their lives.

Set during a sultry summer in a French suburb, Marie is desperate to join the local pool's synchronized swimming team, but is her interest solely for the sake of sport or for a chance to get close to Floriane, the bad girl of the team? Sciamma, and the two leads, capture the uncertainty of teenage sexuality with a sympathetic eye in this delicate drama of the angst of coming-of-age.

A world-weary college professor is given a life-changing diagnosis and decides to throw all pretense and conventions to the wind and live his life as boldly and freely as possible with a biting sense of humor, a reckless streak and a touch of madness.

Cozy, a dissatisfied housewife, meets Lee at a bar. A drink turns into a home break-in, and a gunshot sends them on the run together, thinking they've committed murder.

Three generations of women who seek to murder their husbands share a solidarity for one another which brings about three copy-cat drownings.

Bill McKay is a candidate for the U.S. Senate from California. He has no hope of winning, so he is willing to tweak the establishment.

A renowned New York playwright is enticed to California to write for the movies and discovers the hellish truth of Hollywood.

Alain and Marie moved to the suburb house of their dreams. But the real estate agent warned them: what is in the basement may well change their lives forever.

A group of friends at a Jerusalem retirement home build a machine for self-euthanasia in order to help their terminally ill friend. When rumors of the machine begin to spread, more and more people ask for their help, and the friends are faced with an emotional dilemma

When a willful young man tries to venture beyond his sequestered Pennsylvania hamlet, his actions set off a chain of chilling incidents that will alter the community forever.

A single mom is raped by an invisible force. Her psychiatrist believes the experience stems from childhood trauma, while she knows something supernatural is at play.

A young man abandons his family for a solitary life of fly-fishing. His goal was to find his own way in the fishing world and thereby find himself and love.

This film, loosely inspired by Anton Chekov's The Seagull, weaves a story about sex, family and the business of making films. When the young and overly sensitive filmmaker Julien screens his new DV art-film starring his girlfriend Lili (Swimming Pool's Ludivine Sagnier) --a sexy young local girl--to his famous actress mother Mado, and her lover Brice, an accomplished film director, an unraveling of the delicate peace in their house begins. The graceful beauty Lili, who dreams of becoming a famous actress like Mado, is immediately fascinated by Brice, who gladly falls prey to her charms.

A business man buys a house, but he has a hard time trying to get rid of its previous tenant, a dirty bum.

Four everyday suburban guys come together as an excuse to escape their humdrum lives one night a week. But when they accidentally discover that their town has become overrun with aliens posing as ordinary suburbanites, they have no choice but to save their neighborhood – and the world – from total extermination.

The life of a woman is transformed after she is diagnosed with a terminal disease, fired from her job and abandoned by her boyfriend. Given two months to live, she throws caution to the wind to pursue her dreams.

When a son and mother move to Seattle in hopes for a better life, the mother meets a seemingly polite man. Things go south when the man turns out to be abusive, endangering their lives. As the mother struggles to maintain hope in an impossible situation, the son has plans to escape.

A young nurse, Alma, is put in charge of Elisabeth Vogler: an actress who is seemingly healthy in all respects, but will not talk. As they spend time together, Alma speaks to Elisabeth constantly, never receiving any answer.

An unemployed Brit vents his rage on unsuspecting strangers as he embarks on a nocturnal London odyssey.

The escape of Bubber Reeves from prison affects the inhabitants of a small Southern town.


