The Deep End. Scott McGehee. 2001.
This started off as a run-of-the-mill spiralling-into-complications film, but then it took a more original turn.
It’s weird seeing films from this area, though. Cell phone usage was prevalent, but script writers didn’t want to acknowledge that, because it makes all the traditional “person who can’t be reached” plot lines irrelevant. So instead of coming up with new plot points, they doubled don’t on the unreachability through exotic means. I remember Buffy episodes where Spike just couldn’t get his to work, so he’d throw them out the car window, and so on. In this one, they have one person be out on a military carrier which is… “out of range”… Yeah, yeah.
A couple years later, the writers just gave up on all those plots and came up with new ones that allowed everybody to be within reach of everybody else all the time.
This post is part of The Tilda Swinton Project.