THE POOL

A group of young and wealthy students from Prague finish their high school exams and prepare to celebrate the end of their long educational journey together in a wild and exaggerated way. Since, once their studies are over, their paths are destined to soon or later diverge, the young people decide to throw an unforgettable party, reserved for a few close friends, secretly entering a huge public swimming pool in the middle of the night. What they do not know is that among the guests hides a dangerous killer, determined to kill every participant in the night of celebrations. Upon discovering the first corpses, suspicion and fear will immediately begin to spread among the young people, bringing to the surface old and new grudges, long-hidden resentments, and secrets kept over time, making the desperate struggle for survival in a swimming pool that has now become a deadly trap even more arduous. We're not there, not at all! Once again a group of rich, beautiful, and spoiled young people, once again a masked killer driven by anger and loneliness, once again a film full of stale clichés, chewed and re-chewed. But how can one conceive of a film like this and even decide to make it? How can one not notice the banality of narrative and cinematic schemes that have been overused far too much? The mockery of the audience and their intelligence cannot be a coincidence this time either: it really seems that the screenwriters and the director sat down to create a sort of test to measure our capacity for endurance. "The Pool" indeed serves us on a silver platter what is most banal and predictable that a last-generation horror movie can offer, starting from a particularly insignificant story, below-average acting, a lack of tension and involvement that is downright embarrassing. Even in the murder sequences, the film offers very little: a few splashes of blood here and there without much conviction and only one well-conceived scene (and at least entertaining) but which, partially revealed in the trailers, loses most of its surprise effect. The best example to explain the annoyance one feels when watching "The Pool" is right in front of us during the first three minutes of the film, absolutely shocking and capable, on their own, of making us want to run out of the cinema. Imagine the scene: rainy night, huge and isolated villa, woman alone in the house and on the phone, while she cooks waiting for her boyfriend. Here comes the unexpected: the phone line drops. Oh, my God, what a scare! A car approaches the house: will it be the partner or the killer? The doorbell rings, the woman goes to open it but there is no one at the door: so she goes out into the rain and approaches the car parked in the driveway, repeatedly calling out her boyfriend's name until she sees him dead in the car, his face bloodied and his expression not happy. The girl runs back into the house in panic, slams the door and takes the keys to lock it. But attention, plot twist: the keys fall from her hand! Oh, my God, and now? Fortunately, she still manages to lock herself in the house but... another plot twist! The maniac is already in the house and she has just locked herself inside... After only three minutes, one wonders if it is really necessary to go on, if it is really so important to know how the rest of the film continues. And from that moment on, the questions begin to succeed each other in our mind in rapid succession: do we really care about the life of a group of spoiled, super-rich, unpleasant young people, and moreover surrounded by beautiful and willing girls? Or, since we have never had a beautiful and uninhibited classmate, a brand new Mercedes to drive around, and an account from an Arab sheikh, do we prefer to side with the bad guy and tear apart these unpleasant mommy's darlings? But in the case we decide to impersonate the bad guy, would we really go around cutting up our friends just because sometimes they didn't make us feel an integral part of the group? And moreover if we were killers, would we really go around in black tights and a skull-shaped mask? Wouldn't we just laugh at ourselves looking in the mirror? So many, too many questions assault our mind. Better to relax, take a deep breath and summarize everything with a single and concise question: is it really worth watching this movie? Absolutely not.