Going back in time can be a romantic idea.
Sometimes, it’s movies or music that helps us transport back to a more peaceful time. In The Song of Sway Lake, it’s a piece of music that gets two young men to go back to an old family house looking for a rare family record- the titular “Song of Sway Lake” which, along with its value, holds family memories and secrets that must also be confronted.
The Song of Sway Lake follows Ollie (Rory Culkin) who brings his Russian vagabond friend Nikolai (Robert Sheehan) to his old family house to help him search through records and photographs for a rare family record they are trying to pawn off. They break into the house and have a general sense of unsupervised fun, but what starts as a private looting turns into a family affair when his grandmother Charlie (Mary Beth Peil) arrives with her caretaker (Elizabeth Peña, in her final film role), who is also there to find the family record. The lake house brings to the surface a collective of wants and desires. Ollie catches the eye of purple-haired Isadora (Isabelle McNally) who soon consumes his thoughts, and Charlie, when not reading old correspondences from her late husband, stares vacantly out at sea still shaken over his death and a general longing for time.
[Ari] Gold mixes in a sprinkling of secrecy and mystery to the lake where dreamy and surreal visual sequences that manifest themselves elevate the film beyond more than just a summer coming-of-age movie.
The Song of Sway Lake is a juxtaposition of old and new, between the timeless and the modern, which stylistically brings about a mixture of tones throughout the film. The upper-class heirs of yesteryear that Charlie recounts when socialites went to vacation stands in opposition to Ollie’s attitude, his own long hair, and quiet defiance. But together they share a consuming level of introspection that the remote lake house brings, forcing Ollie to confront the death of his father who took his life by walking into the thin ice of Sway Lake while Charlie grows ever more silent.
To this end, there’s a consuming, haunted undertone to The Song of Sway Lake that director Ari Gold, who co-wrote the movie with Elizabeth Bull, brings to the film. Gold mixes in a sprinkling of secrecy and mystery to the lake where dreamy and surreal visual sequences that manifest themselves elevate the film beyond more than just a summer coming-of-age movie. The Song of Sway Lake will make you consider what the price of holding onto the past costs, and the infinite boundless depths where things lie at the bottom of the lake.
100 min. ‘The Song of Sway Lake’ is rated R for language, graphic nudity, and some sexual content. Now playing at Laemmle’s Music Hall, available On Digital and On Demand on September 25, 2018
