The Pond: Stagnant

I sort of feel like trailers are a necessary evil for this thing of mine. I like going into films as blind as possible, but if I’m curious about something or am just casting about for more films to consider, trailers (and trailer compilations on YouTube if I’m being totally honest) can give me a quick thumbnail sketch, not just in the trailer itself, but how it’s put together. If the trailer indulges in the stylistic cliches of the moment, the film probably will too. If it doesn’t, if it shows me something promising, then cool. Now I’ve got another movie to check out.

Usually it serves me pretty well, but I gotta say, I feel like I got suckered this time. When you watch the trailer for The Pond, it’s promising - you think it’s gonna be some out-there folk/cosmic horror shit, but no, it’s just a pointlessly cryptic slog that feels like someone watched shows like Katla and Zone Blanche and thought it’d get over on quirk alone. It does not.

That said, it’s got a pretty striking opening shot. It’s an aerial view of a body lying in the middle of a field. The shot is held for a bit, before the body…just gets up and walks away. It’s a little odd, a little sinister. But that doesn’t last long. We cut to a man sitting in a small, modest trailer, typing out things on a laptop. He doesn’t even have a name, he’s credited as “The Professor.” And he’s definitely the stock academic – salt-and-pepper beard, rustic sweater, sleeping with a former student, the whole deal. He’s living on a remote island in a rural part of Eastern Europe, studying…something? It’s never clear, he’s just looking at a bunch of maps of incidence rates of things like death from disease, obesity rates, paths of hurricanes and deaths by accidents, and they’re all connectable by Fibonacci spirals. Then he types out some quasi-profound stuff like “SOCIETY PRODUCES FEAR” and he looks up some stuff about how we can only see a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum…so there could be things out there we cannot see! Spooky! When one shot shows him consulting a website called “The Daily Science,” it is…not reassuring. He was apparently suspended from his position at…a university, I guess?...because he has some weird ideas about impending apocalypse. At least, I think that’s the deal. Nothing is made very clear, which is in and of itself not always a bad thing, but this film has a bad habit of dropping all kinds of stuff into our lap with little to no context or opportunity to figure things out for ourselves. There’s little telling, and no showing. Just a bunch of stuff that’s supposed to add up to something and never really does.

So he’s out here with his former student and his daughter by his late wife, in some kind of academic exile. He’s convinced that there’s something terrible coming and he’s on the verge of grasping it, and so he’s out here in the sticks, in a trailer camp on the edge of a large pond (hence the title, though the importance of the pond is never made clear) in a small community of people whose chief defining characteristic is that they’re all kind of weird. There’s another guy that the professor plays chess with, and they have conversations that I think are supposed to be mysterious and inscrutable but just come off as the musings of a college freshman who just discovered weed, there are two obnoxious little girls who keep pestering the professor to let his daughter play with them, there’s a woodsman with an anger management problem, and a boatman who ferries people across the pond. He doesn’t speak at all, he just sort of sits slumped and unresponsive in the boat with a strange piece of headgear that looks sort of like pillows that you just keep strapped to your head. It’s all reminiscent of that whole strain of television that sort of sprung out of Twin Peaks, the rural community where strange things are happening, except in my experience those shows have actual characters with lives and relationships. Here, less so. It’ s just a bunch of people out in the middle of nowhere being gratuitously weird. Every now and then the professor’s daughter will talk about a monster that she sees in her nightmares, and every now and then someone in an effectively creepy mask made out of branches will sort of show up in the background. Nobody really comments on it.

So the narrative falls flat, and so does the execution. This film was written and performed by people for whom English is not a first language, and though I won’t fault anyone for that by itself, I think the decision to have English be the film’s spoken language was a mistake. The dialogue is clumsy and stilted, as are the performances. People don’t say things so much as they recite them, and it’s all slightly off – not the worst translation I’ve ever heard (still looking at you, Seytan), but…just awkward enough to inhabit some kind of linguistic uncanny valley. It's sort of off-putting, and again, this by itself isn’t necessarily a problem, but it doesn’t feel intentionally off-putting. Everything is delivered so flatly, with so little emotion that it’s almost parodic, a comedic approximation of Scandinavian art films where people stand stiffly and say things that you get are supposed to be profound but just seem like nonsense. I don’t know that the filmmakers were going for profundity so much as surrealism, but they didn’t hit that either. Mostly it’s just obtuse, and there’s no payoff, no revelation of some kind of purpose behind the strangeness. What horrifying truths I think we’re supposed to glean all show up in the last ten minutes, and because our ability to invest in these characters is minimal, and the stakes never really made apparent, they feel less like horrifying truths and more like “oh, okay.”

And absolutely none of this is helped by the film’s pacing – well, I say “pacing,” but there’s one pace: Slow. Things just sort of happen at the rate of a drip, People say things, they move from one place to another, occasionally something odd or unsettling pops up in the background before moving on to the next thing, without notice or comment. It’s a bad sign that I was only about a third of the way through it before I was moved to check to see how much longer I had. It’s not slow enough to create a feeling or mood, it’s just a metronomic plod with no rising tension, no moments of action, just one thing after another. It’s clumsy, frustratingly slow, and…drab. Gray, overcast, colorless, and that’s a legitimate choice, but when everything else about the film is equally colorless, the overall feeling is…well, again, I wouldn’t go so far as to call it oppressive, it just sort of lands at dull. At 90 minutes, it’s a trudge. Flat people delivering clumsy lines in a gray setting. The number of even slightly unsettling moments can be counted on one hand, and they pass as unremarkably as any other moment in this film.

Slow, strange, cryptic, bleak, all of these are valid choices, I think. But cryptic only works if the audience can, by the time the film is over, make some connections for themselves. There doesn’t have to be one correct interpretation (miss me with all of the videos “explaining” the endings of movies) or anything, just the opportunity to derive some meaning from it. And slow, strange, and bleak only work if they evoke a mood, if they make the audience feel things. Nothing about this film inspires feelings beyond impatience and frustration. The trailer promises something upon which the actual film can’t even begin to deliver.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon