THE SWERVE

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND CONTAINS SPOILERS

The Swerve is, frustratingly, half a good film, and half a bad film. The first section is perfectly decent: well observed, well written and played, interesting, entirely plausible and absorbing. But somewhere in the middle it morphs into something utterly annoying, occasionally ridiculous, and ends on a miserable downbeat note that undoes a lot of the earlier good work and, for me, left me deflated and unenthused. Maybe I wanted it to play to the crowd a little more, maybe I wanted it to be more of the psychological thriller the director introduced it as.

It's not a psychological thriller, it's a psychological drama. It's a coldly believable piece centred around English teacher Holly (Azure Skye) and her frankly horrible family: lazy children, unloving (and faithless) husband, aggressively unlikeable sister. She's on sleeping medication, she's downtrodden (stuck with the washing up while everyone else enjoys themselves), ignored, taken for granted, routinely unappreciated... until one evening she runs a couple of obnoxious bellowing yahoos off the road.

But at somewhere around the halfway point there's a scene, which I shall obliquely refer to as The Hand Scene, when I lost all sympathy and involvement. Partly because dramatically it just didn't fit, partly because it seemed so wildly out of character (not to mention unprofessional) for her, and partly because why are we still supposed to empathise with her? The swerve of the title is not so much the fatal car crash, more her sudden shift in character. And from that point it doesn't get better: once the sad scrapey strings kicked off with an elegy for a dead mouse (shamefully, I giggled) there was no way back for it.

I'm also not sure whether a movie about someone with a whole battery of anxieties, problems and stresses should send such a questionable message by ending with the darkest of all possible conclusions, but maybe that was the point: this is what ultimately happens if people's psychological and emotional needs aren't addressed but allowed to fester until there's no other way out. Certainly it would have been easier, and more popcorn fun, for that car "accident" to have triggered in her the strength to  seriously sort her loathsome brood out, but that wasn't the film they wanted to make even if, deep down, that was more the kind of film I wanted to watch.

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