Ric Rawlins’ Wild Swimmers opens on the last day of semester at the University of Bath, with a lecturer (Kirris Riviere) setting his students an assignment for the summer vacation. “I want you to go out there and find your own story,” he tells them. “I don’t care if it’s a nature reserve that’s about to be smashed up and made into a supermarket, or an asteroid that’s about to hit us all on Valentine’s Day, but where I’m going is, make sure the story has drama, and make sure the story has legs.” This is an exercise in tabloid-style journalism, where facts never need get in the way of a good story and where the criteria for “sustaining a long term news cycle” are sensation, spectacle and scandal rather than truth – even if Deji (Valerie Kwok), who has come to study journalism in Britain after witnessing her home state’s propagandistic cover-up of its own oppression, is driven to expose truth to the light. It is a mission that may make it difficult for her ever to return home to her family.
A local retired policewoman (Nadine Comba) gives Deji the lead for her story. In 2017, a female student drowned while wild swimming with a boyfriend in the Avon. The case is long since closed, but something unusual about it still haunt the policewoman. Deji is quick to apply Occam’s razor to what the policewoman regards as mystery, and to see the likely truth behind the story. “I don’t mean to talk this down,” Deji says, “but people have drowned here before and since then, because it’s a student town.” Yet even young adult high jinks and alcohol do not account for the bite marks found on the victim’s neck, apparently from a (non-native) cottonmouth snake. As Deji starts collecting statements and more stories from the various eccentrics living on the river in barges, the body count suddenly climbs, and the aspiring reporter witnesses with her own eyes a most unnatural death on the water. “There’s something killing people in the river, and I’m going to find it,” Deji tells photographer Kim (Caroline Murray), a mature student recently thrown out of the university, as the two form an odd couple united in their exile – Deji’s by ethnicity and Kim’s by age. Their investigation of the serial murders brings them into confrontation with local loner Gerald Baker (Robin Bailes), who has a history along these banks.
In a way, Deji’s journey downstream follows precisely the course set by her lecturer. For she leaves the shore where she was grounded in reality, and drifts into a more fluid world of myth, somewhere between the idyllic river tales of Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 children’s novel The Wind in the Willows (a copy of which Deji is seen thumbing), the underwater menace (and a certain musical cue) from Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), the canal horror of Charlie Steeds’ The Barge People (2019), and a very different kind of gothic trope not usually associated with rivers. Along the way the film takes in other stories – the sense of having grown old too fast shared by Kim and Deji’s sister (Joanne Leung), the predatory nature of Deji’s boyfriend Mark (Harry Mason), and even a piece of local history from 1682 – all of which obliquely amplify and embellish the timeless tale unfolding on the banks.
As Deji becomes ever more dogged in pursuing this story, her disorientation is marked – in a literal chase sequence – by a confusion of day shots, night shots and day-for-night shots, in a film where both sunlight and darkness play important rôles. Deji is, on any interpretation, losing herself as she gets in too deep. Ultimately she will retreat altogether from the reality that she once cherished, and will end up in the film’s equivalent of Plato’s cave – an echo chamber or perhaps cul de sac where all these stories, tall and true, come together in the shadows so that they can continue to have legs. Notably in this context, when Deji receives the call that will lure her into her new life of legend, she is sitting alone in a cinema, that other Plato’s cave where we surrender ourselves to the projected attractions of illusion and fantasy.
Beautifully shot by Rawlins in summery Somerset, Wild Swimmers is an unusual, highly localised take on a familiar horror monster – and it is framed in such a way as to invite the viewer to see through its more sensational narrative elements to underlying truths, easily lost in the wash, about female marginalisation, alienation and annihilation. Of course, the biggest real danger for wild swimmers in England is the sewage – but that story isn’t so sexy.
strap: Ric Rawlins’ Somerset horror sends a budding Chinese journalist downstream from truth to a local (but universal) gothic myth of exile
© Anton Bitel
