The Drowned

dir: Samuel Clemens

2025

I knew almost nothing about this flick before I watched it, and now I know even less.

For much of its beginning, I was really on board, in that the start of the flick has a disturbing atmosphere and troubling, tense visuals despite the fact that there’s only one person on screen. He has the air of someone who’s very concerned about being seen or is being chased or something. It feels really tense, as he makes his way to an isolated house on the coast. They never mention it in the flick, but it’s a house on the coast of Kent, which is south-east England.

This chap, Eric (Alan Calton) sweeps and clears the house room by room with a gun out, so you know he’s not fucking around. I don’t know what he’s done or he’s planning to do, but it doesn’t seem like he’s involved in charity work. This beginning is dialogue-free, until someone else shows up.

Matt (Dominic Vulliamy) starts quizzing Eric as to where Matt’s mother is. Eric doesn’t mention that he found a bangle in a puddle of blood at the edge of the beach just before Matt turned up. They seem like a couple(?)

Reference is made to a painting. Reference is made to whether everything went as planned or if they fucked up, and where’s Denise anyway? Denise is Matt’s mum. We haven’t seen Denise, so who knows what happened to her.

Clearly, these jerks stole some painting worth tens of millions of pounds, so they’re concerned that someone is going to find them. We only see the painting in snippets, when weird shit is happening.

When I say “weird shit is happening” I mean this is a film in which weird shit is happening all the time, with zero explanation, but we kind of get it because bad things happen to bad people, I guess. A better film gets us to care about the central protagonists or their plight, or at least have thoughts about them but this flick doesn’t have the budget to make us care about these people, or the inclination to care in general.

That’s okay, horror isn’t a genre where you have to care about the protagonists in order to make what happens to them resonate, depending on what happens to them, or to be entertaining. It helps, though.

This flick, though… I started getting a sinking feeling about half an hour in and it just kept getting worse, and not in a way that’s conducive to an enjoyable cinematic experience or one that’s entertaining. This sounds insulting, and I’m not trying to be insulting, in that I acknowledge people with positive creative intentions banded together to make a work of art they hoped would connect with audiences across the global, but this gets dumber the further it goes along.

Something, some kind of supernatural force is not happy with the three chaps (a third one turns up, some twerpy Italian chap, I’m not going to dignify his efforts by even naming him), and then at arbitrary points these three chaps, upon hearing a godawful sound, start wandering around like they’ve been hypnotised or like they’re being controlled by some other entities. This force is represented by a drone camera recording footage as it flies towards the house, occasionally inverting itself, and it does it a bunch of times. For… reasons.

They don’t do anything interesting while under the influence, or horrific, or anything to justify the effort, and then they come to, confused as to the time lost over the preceding however many minutes or hours.

I know the feeling. Many a weekend in my callow youth was spent in a similar state due to the call of a siren or two, with as little to show for it as these guys. But even worse is the feeling of

So, yes, the paranoid thriller where crims get together after a heist and then paranoia and ego make them tear each other apart isn’t a new template; it wasn’t even new when Tarantino ripped it off for Reservoir Dogs back in the day, but the added element here is that some supernatural force is attacking from for reasons. What might those reasons be…

Well, whatever you might imagine, it’s much dumber than that.

On this stone pebbled beach appear three women, out of nowhere, in the middle of the night, with three different accents, none of which are local. They ask awkward questions and even compel the jerks to play two truths and a lie, for… reasons. It’s painfully done and, if what you might call the real story that’s going on is revealed, it makes you think back and say “well, what was the point of all that bullshit?”

That they are supernatural beings makes you think, well, these three chaps have done something wrong and thus must be made to suffer. So this is an additional way to make them suffer, on top of the taking their minds over and making them do strange things like walk around on a pebble beach without realising it. Are they there to seduce them, are they there to eat them, both, neither?

Who the fuck cares. Since this over-edited piece of shit flick keeps showing snippets of the painting, the painting, the fucking painting, you might think the painting matters. What painting, you are wondering mildly? The painting they stole.

These guys stole a painting, so three sirens, three furies from Greek mythology come to punish them. There’s all this stuff about hearing the sound that makes them lose their minds and lose time, the siren’s call, and maybe blocking their ears to save themselves, like, uh Ulysses and the Sirens, the famous painting by the pre-Raphaelite painter John William Waterhouse?

That’s a pretty famous painting. I’ve seen it in person, because I’m lucky enough to live in a cultured city like Melbourne where the National Gallery of Victoria has that painting on its walls (belches loudly). It’s a great painting, like most of Waterhouse’s paintings.

But it’s not the painting this flick is centred around. The one they’re focussed on, the one these jerks stole, is Hylas and the Nymphs. I don’t know what that has to do with anything, in life, in the world, or in this flick, but something something supernatural ladies turn up and, eventually, I think, kill everyone. The myth of Hylas in Ovid’s Metamorphoses has him drowning at the hand of the nymphs, but so what? He didn’t steal a painting by JW Waterhouse, so it’s not like it set the precedent for mythical beings killing thieves. That painting hangs in a gallery in Manchester, and though that city of industry has produced several sirens of song and stage, I can’t see why any of them would attach themselves to this painting supernaturally, even if it was worth 40 million pounds.

The sequel to this flick will have a band of thieves steal Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, and then some sunflowers appear and beat the thieves to death but very slowly and sporadically stretched out to nearly an hour and a half. But also they get really bad hayfever symptoms, with no relief.

The paintings, both of them, would have to be in the public domain, so in terms of using them here, it’s the maker’s choice. I guess, since Waterhouse depicted the sirens as half woman half birds to cover the monstrous feminine in the earlier painting it didn’t entirely go with the aesthetic they wanted for this flick, of women in cocktail dresses maybe killing people, maybe not. I have to say no-one’s acting in this is in any way convincing, so my quibbling over these little details feels petty and exhausting, because it doesn’t matter one bit about the performances, the aesthetics, the ideas behind anything, nothing. Whatever ideas they might have had initially just seem to be squandered by what they’ve produced here.

Okay, one more thing really annoyed me, and then I’ll let it go before condemning this poorly executed mess any longer: since this is set on a coast, and the beach is entirely a pebble rock beach, for reasons I cannot fathom, instead of actually recording the terrifying sounds that such beaches can produce when the water recedes through the rocks, they just have a generic recording of waves cresting on a regular sand beach. That was a deliberate choice. People must have debated at length as to whether they should use the sound you’d actually get from that beach, or a beach like it, or go with a sand beach sound, and someone coyly insisted “otherwise people might get confused”.

Yeah, that was the worry, not the completely incoherent and misconceived story and pointless plot; the sound of the beach would have confused the 3 people that probably saw this in a cinema.

Some flicks, damn, whatever noble intentions their creation might have started from, goddamn the places they end up. This is the second worst thing I’ve seen this year, thus far.

3 times JW Waterhouse doesn’t deserve the ignominy of being associated with this shitty flick out of 10

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“That would be cheating, and you know what we do to cheaters.” – do you force them to watch terrible movies, maybe? - The Drowned