Movie Nation

It stands to reason that a movie about a haunted pool swallowing children and adults would absolutely have to have extraordinary underwater photography, just by design.

“Night Swim” manages that, so a tip of the scuba mask to underwater director of photography Ian S. Takahashi (“Under the Silver Lake,” “The Lost City”). The scenes beneath the surface, looking up or looking down, with victims struggling against whatever is after them, are just beautifuly lit and shot.

The movie? It’s middling, even by early January horror release standards. A few moments of suspense, a belated “Maybe I should play this guy as funny/crazy” decision by leading man Wyatt Russell, a little “It!” and not much else in terms of inspiration, and effects that don’t add to the fear quotient sends this sinker down for the third time.

In 1992, a little girl (Ayazhan Dalabayeva) is lured to the pool in her bunny slippers in the middle of the night so that she can retrieve her kid brother’s toy boat — which had disappeared and is how circling the pool, under its own power.

Before wee Rebecca can scream “Toy boat toy boat toy boat,” nothing but a floating bunny slipper remains.

Decades later, and third baseball Ray Waller (Russell, son of Goldie and Kurt) and his family decide to move into the house with the pool in back. He’s dealing with the onset of multiple sclerosis, his doctor is empathetic but no-nonsense.

“Forget baseball.”

He’ll have to live off educator wife Eve’s (Kerry Condon of “Three Billboards,” “The Banshees of Inisherin” and TV’s “Ray Donovan) insurance and income, rooting for his aspiring swimmer daughter (Amélie Hoeferle) coaching his little boy (Gavin Warren) in America’s Pastime, despite the crutch he now uses.

That pool? That’s therapeutic. Ray soon proves that as his symptoms abate and he feels as if he might get another shot at the Big Leagues, all thanks to the “land of sky blue waters” that fills that pool.

But the wife and the kids soon have other experiences when they swim — voices from the overflow drains, items disappearing, hallucinations about who is peering over the edge down at them, mistaking swimming down for swimming up, living corpses sneaking up on them, holding them under water.

“Marco Polo” becomes a game with a menacing edge under those conditions. But only slightly.

The “rules” of writer-director Bryce McGuire’s world are explained in the third act, and don’t add up to much.

The build-up towards a “Jaws” style “pool party” that’s as ill-advised as opening the Amity beaches on July 4 is mostly-botched. There just isn’t much suspense in the death-comes-from-the-pool scenes that we haven’t seen in the film’s trailers.

But the underwater attacks, escapes and revelations are gorgeous to look at, with a lot of the cast and the effects crew immersing us in the perils of a pool, even if they never get a handle on how frantic drowning and near-drowning is as an experience.

Any more than anybody REALLY gets a handle on how one would likely respond to the terrors of facing something supernatural and evil.

One or two “Minnesota” touches, provided by the dizzy realtor (Nancy Lenehan), and Russell deciding to occasionally make the increasingly unhinged Ray comical as well as possessed and evil aren’t enough to save it.

“Night Swim” never amounts to much more than a dip in lukewarm water.

Rating: PG-13 for terror, some violent content and profanity

Cast: Wyatt Russell, Kerry Condon, Amélie Hoeferle, Gavin Warren, Nancy Lenehan, Eddie Martinez, Ayazhan Dalabayeva and Jodi Long.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Bryce McGuire. A Blumhouse/Universal release.

Running time: 1:38

“Stroking an Animal” is a dull, pretentious Catalan “four seasons with a polyamorous threesome” melodama in which not a lot happens. Well, not a lot that involves people with their clothes on.

Pointing itself at the “obvious” flaws in such an arrangement — “obvious” to those not in it, or “into” it — it meanders towards a conclusion as inconclusive as its introduction.

Mariña and Ada (Lidia Veiga, Ánxela Ríos) are really into each other and into “it” as the film opens on a heavy-duty makeout session, sans clothes, shot in a near blur of extreme close-ups.

When they’re done, we realize they were in a tent in the Pyrnees, as they exit and finish off their frolic with a topless dip in a mountain stream.

A bearded, topknotted hipster (Xulio Besteiro) strolls up and captures them on his camcorder. He’s not just a creep spying on lesbians, which would have been dramatic, if cliched. We quickly realize he’s part of this arrangement as he joins in on their carnal carrying on.

Tomás, as we eventually learn his name to be, is their third wheel. Everybody’s experimenting, relishing every chance to share a bed and the forbidden fruit of a non-monogamous relationship.

But all this “Stroking an Animal” is going to lead to jealousy, hard feelings and “tests” of the depths of love. Or so every other movie to dabble in the subject has taught us.

In Ángel Filgueira’s aimless, mostly drama-starved “Cando toco un animal,” the “seasons” or chapters — there are more than four here — are introduced by quasi-poetic musings in written, graphic form — thoughts on dragonflies, cats, this and that.

“I read that cats bite when the can’t containt the love that they feel inside.”

Symbolic? Maybe.

“Biting” is about the time trouble sets in as SOMEbody wants a little more of SOMEthing that SOMEbody else can’t give her, sexually.

These chapters, in Galician with English subtitles (like the dialogue), are written by Mariña, we learn, a writer who is sort of participant/observer to all this.

Only she isn’t. Filgueira has made a movie with no actual point of view, no protagonist for the audience to identify with, to lead us through the bare bones of this “story.”

Stripped of story (mostly) and drama (almost entirely), what we’re left with is a lot of coital coupling and thrupling. Take away the “chapter” headings and this is straight-to-video titilation, and not all that titilating at that.

Rating: unrated, explicit sex, nudity

Cast: Lidia Veiga, Ánxela Ríos and Xulio Besteiro

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ángel Filgueira. A Breaking Glass release.

Running time: 1:09

The director of “The Harder They Fall” Western is behind the camera for this riff on a contemporary of Jesus “inspired” to live a “divine” life, or fake it until he makes it.

LaKeith Stanfield stars, with Benedict Cumberbatch, Alfre Woodard, Omar Sy, James McAvoy, Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Teyana Taylor dressing up the supporting cast in this BCE satire, which opens Jan. 12.

A serial killer is on the loose, murdering “foreign workers” in Taiwan. Let’s put our best detective on the case! You know, the one we meet just as she’s attempting to commit suicide in the same car where her partner/lover pulled the trigger on himself.

“The Abandoned” is a “by the book” police procedural serial killer thriller. The “book” in this case means no genre trope can be passed by, no melodramatic flourish left out.

A couple of decent twists, some good performances and two grimly realistic third-act fights recommend this new film from the director of “Double Date,” Ying-Ting Tseng. Everything else? Tried and true and kind of worn out.

Janine Chun-Ning, no newcomer to the genre herself (cop web and TV series, etc.) is Det. Wue Jie, still wracked by grief, still living in the car where her beloved killed himself a year before. She’s just about to put a second hole in the roof via a bullet through her chin when she’s interrupted by a woman being chased by hooligans.

Hunting along the waterfront for them, she finds a body. By the time the coroner gets hold of the corpse, with signs of ritualistic murder, she’s found her purpose. She will find out who this woman was — fingerprints have been removed — and track down her murderer.

Her gruff boss (veteran character actor Wei-min Chen) tells her “All I ask is for you to be OK.” Oh, and that she take the perky rookie (Chloe Xiang) along and show her how to investigate a murder before accepting a transfer to some less stressful department.

They’ll need to dig into Taiwan’s “foreign worker” underworld — with its human trafficking, fake IDs, “dissapearances” and the racism that drives the indifference such cases invite. They’ll need to hurry, because flash-forwards in the opening scene have shown us a woman tied up in an underground lair, awaiting her murder, and that what we’re watching unfold begins “five days earlier.”

We also meet Lin You-sheng (Ethan Juan), a grumpy grocer who plays a part in all these Thai, Vietnamese and Filipino “foreign workers” slipping into the country. Lin You-Sheng fell for a Thai woman he helped, who dumped him when he wouldn’t get serious.

When her sister (Sajee Apiwong) shows up, telling him his ex has “gone missing,” we put things together before he does.

Waree was her name. She’s already dead. And thanks to his ties to her and to that underworld, we have our Prime Suspect.

There’s interesting detail in the police work and the modus operandi of those helping these workers get in and go underground. But much of what we’re treated to is straight-up melodrama.

Want to test how much the ex-lover Lin is upset by Waroo’s murder? Get a cop to go undercover at the station, pretend to be a handcuffed suspect, and taunt the grieving man with a racist “Thais are dirty…you’ll catch a disease” tirade to see if it sets him off.

Some of the trickier parts of the case — IDing the body, for instance — are dispensed with via anonymous phone calls. That’s lazy. We meet the killer early on, hear explanations of such a mass murderer’s “motivations,” but see little of that.

All the fake names and peripheral characters are added to the mix just to throw the viewer off the scent of a seriously formulaic story — suicidal cop/irritable boss/rookie partner who has to prove herself, all chasing a serial killer.

“They say the corpse chooses the cop” sounds like a line from a half dozen Hollywood films and many a TV police procedural episode.

Twenty-four minutes were cut from this thriller — which plays out in Mandarin, Thai and Min Nan with English subtitles for Netflix — thank goodness.

It’s solid enough, with a little suspense in the third act. But the main thing “The Abandoned” accomplishes is showing that police picture tropes translate to most any language, and translated or not, it’s very hard for one to manage more than a surprise or two in between the cliches.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence

Cast: Janine Chun-Ning Chang, Ethan Juan, Chloe Xiang, Wei-min Chen and Sajee Apiwong

Credits: Directed by Ying-Ting Tseng, scripted by Pin Chun Lin, Yi-Chen Yang and Ying-Ting Tseng A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44

Every now and then, some piece of music turns up in a (horror movie, usually) that makes me do a double take, or if I’m imbibing, a spit take.

How did (whoever the music supervisor/the star/the director) they pull that song out of the air for this movie at this moment?

Whoever supervised the pop hit clearances for “Night Swim” stumbled across (no WAY they would have remembered it) this tune by a fellow who not only once attempted a mustache, he infamously crooned about a dead skunk in the middle of you-know-where.

I know it because I worked in folk-music friendly public radio for a few years. And I interviewed LWIII a few times. Many times. He’s an actor, too. Crooned in “The Aviator” as a big band singer, plucked and played through rehab with Sandra Bullock in “28 Days.” I caught up with him on the set of that picture.

This song is a happy little ditty from the son of a magazine columnist, a fellow who used to be married to folkie Kate McGarrigle, with whom he fathered Rufus. Perfect ironic tune for a killer swimming pool picture, I think Loudon W. would agree.

One’s first new film of the new year, even when it’s previewing in the “Pre stained for your comfort” local AMC, gives one a warm feeling.

Or perhaps that’s the AMC nachos talking.

“Night Swim” opens Thursday, it’s previewing on Wed. Night with a Thursday afternoon embargo on reviews.

Expectations are thus lowered to DeSantis size.

Chilling. Very clever manipulation of action — so many people walking backwards, out of scenes and into further peril.

Bill Nighy, Sonia Braga, Nell Tiger Free and Ralph Ineson headline the cast of this debut feature by Arkasha Stevenson, a prequel “reboot,” as it were.

April 5.

France’s hope for a Best International Feature Oscar this year reside in “The Taste of Things,” a savory, exquisitely-acted immersion in The Pride of France — her cuisine — and a couple who make beautiful dishes together near the end of the 19th century.

The new film from Vietamese director Anh Hung Tran, who gave us “The Scent of Green Papaya,” is a feast for the senses and a romance as dry a glass of French muscadet. There are hints of “Babette’s Feast” and “Big Night,” and a less satisfying taste of “The Remains of the Day” in this love affair where two great cooks “converse with you in the dining room through what you eat,” and the invention and care they put into making it for each other, and us.

Oscar winner Juliette Binoche is Eugénie, queen of the kitchen, supervising helper and server Violette (Galatéa Bellugi) as she wades through each epic meal’s vast preparations. She passes through the garden, choosing cabbages and root vegetables with care. She waltzes through the kitchen with purpose, never a wasted motion, her requests and instructions spare and her mastery of every timeless cooking implement at her command effortless.

The viewer is left to marvel that she’s mixing sauces, brazing lettuce, adding layer after layer of complexity to broths and soups, meats and vegetables, courses and their many sauces (So much CREAM.) without a measuring spoon or measuring cup, and not a thermometer in sight.

We never see the fuel source to what looks like her wood stove. We’re too distracted by the steam, the smoke and imagining the aromas she is conjuring up in all those bowls, pots and pans to wonder how she does it.

Only after much prep and much cooking do we see the great chef Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel) enter this busy workspace. He is not The Boss, not “supervising.” He is cooking, tasting, slicing, dicing, baking and stirring, in perfect sync and perfect harmony with Eugénie.

They have been doing this together, in his kitchen in his chateau, for “20 years,” we learn. After many of these culinary triumphs, shared with a quartet of his gastronome friends (Patrick d’Assumçao, Emmanuel Salinger, Frédéric Fisbach, Jan Hammenecker), he might humbly ask if she’ll leave her door “unlocked” tonight.

They are colleagues, near equals in the kitchen, with her almost certainly the better cook. They are also lovers — nothing formal, just two consenting adults taking their kitchen chemistry to the bedroom. We can see that he wants more, but that he has to broach that subject — “marriage” — with care. She is leery, fulfilled by the relationship they enjoy now.

Oh well, he jokes. As the wags all say (in French with English subtitles), “Marriage is a dinner that begins with dessert.”

Their meals together — she won’t eat with the grastronomes — are sweet, comfortable and familiar. But their cooking is where they best express their love. As they bond over their joint mentoring of a promising, culinarily precocious teen, Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire), their relationship is tested by his desire for more, and other impediments that suggest the wearing nature of their labor and the limits of this most indulgent of French cultural obsessions.

“Nobody” or its acting equivalents star in this gonzo “48 Hour Film Project” version of a making-a-ski-movie comedy, “Weak Layers” opens Friday.

“War Blade” is a rather dull, half-speed WWII commando picture about two Brits and some French resisters trying to storm a Nazi bunker where strange and nefarious things are going on, and not just to the prisoners they’re torturing there.

But C-movie writer-director Nicholas Winter (“Robin Hood: The Rebellion”) puts on another clinic on how to do a period piece on a paltry budget with this inactive action pic.

You don’t need to have Spielberg’s resources to shoot a World War II movie, even today. As long a you start out with more knowledge of the conflict and the genre than the folks who made “Battle for Saipan” did, and maybe have a better idea of what story to tell than the folks who made “Ghosts of War” did, it can be done.

Winter managed the former if not the latter.

Joseph Millson plays Banks, a commando given the job of checking out this bunker, which a Resistance fighter has risked his neck to have his German nurse (Alina Tamara) smuggle to his Resistance cell-leader wife (Rebecca Scott).

Banks is given “a liability, frankly” as his accomplice — a half-mad/mostly-deaf explosives expert (Paul Marlon, good) and orders to contact Ivy, the cell leader who “married a Frenchman” but whom he knew before the war.

The story the escaped German nurse — whose accent comes and goes — tells seems sketchy and far-fetched. But Banks has his orders.

“We need you to go there and make a nuisance of yourself.”

The fights are poorly-managed, stage punches arrive after the sound effect of fist smacking flesh in some cases. The shootouts (involving a DEAF guy) are clumsy.

But for all that and its funereal pacing, Winter manages a reasonably-convincing setting and realistic period look.

You don’t need to show a parachute drop, just its aftermath — commandos gathering their gear and confronted by partisans. You don’t need to show aircraft of the era. Sound effects will do. When a vintage reconaissance plane actually shows up in the finale, it feels like a treat for us and for Winter.

You only need one period-perfect command car. From the looks of things, they got the aged owner to drive it, as well (not necessarily inaccurate, as everybody wanted to “do their bit” in Keep Calm and Carry On-land.

A few WWII rifles and machine guns and a reasonable facsimile of Wehrmacht and SS uniforms will hide a world of shortcomings, although not the to commanding Nazi’s ’80s Anglo-pop bank haircut.

The third act is considerably more polished than the first, even throwing in a bloody twist or two.

But this won’t satisfy action fans or war movie buffs. “War Blade” is of value only to filmmakers with big ideas and no money, or to film schools where it might be shown as an example of what you can manage on a shoestring, a generic script and no one on set who can block, stage, shoot and edit a proper fight to the death.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Joseph Millson, Rebecca Scott, Alina Tamara, Timothy Blore and Paul Marlon

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nicholas Winter. A 101 Pictures release.

Running time: 1:31