‘The Swimmers’ Review: Pool-Hopping Through the Apocalypse
In the near future, during an intense, never-ending summer, four friends try to survive by sneaking into the swimming pools of homes abandoned by their owners.
It was then that he conceived the possibility that if he turned southwest he could reach home by water. There was nothing oppressive in his life, and the delight he took in this idea cannot be explained by reducing it to a mere possibility of escape. He seemed to see, with a cartographer’s eye, the line of swimming pools, the quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county.”
That’s how The Swimmer, the short story by John Cheever, begins—a story later adapted to film in 1968 by Frank Perry, with Burt Lancaster as Ned, a man seized by the peculiar idea of making his way home by swimming through his neighbors’ pools.
Whether Sol Iglesias SK, the director and co-star of Los nadadores, drew directly from that story or its film adaptation is unclear. What is certain is that her original and enigmatic debut can be seen as a loose, climate-change-era variation on that premise. The affluent Connecticut suburbs are nowhere to be found; instead, we’re faced with a near-future Argentine city that feels almost abandoned, where temperatures hover around 50°C and summer has stretched on for 368 consecutive days. Night no longer falls, electricity is scarce, and most of the population has fled.
Still, four friends remain, trying to endure the brutal heat, unable to escape a merciless sun that burns, exhausts, and pushes the film’s cinematography into something close to the hallucinatory. They are Maqueta (Tobías Reizes), Victoria (Valentina D’Emilio), El Rubio (Joaquín Fretes), and Ella (played by the filmmaker herself). Their drifting journey echoes that of Cheever’s Ned: moving from pool to pool—not to swim for sport, but simply to cool down. Here, too, there doesn’t seem to be any real home waiting at the end.
The Swimmers unfolds through that sense of drift. Maqueta has a kind of water phobia and struggles to immerse himself despite the heat. El Rubio (who isn’t particularly blond) is restless and inquisitive, always poking around. Victoria and Ella are the boldest: they choose empty houses to use their pools, dive in from heights, and venture into unknown spaces without knowing what they might encounter.
SK’s film is far from a conventional narrative. It sets up this scenario and lets it evolve, guided by a mix of curiosity and suffocation, fascination and fatigue, heat and thirst. Warm Coca-Colas circulate constantly (free product placement, though the brand hardly needs it), while the atmosphere shifts from thermal to psychedelic, from inviting to tense, from playful to deeply unsettling.
Los nadadores never explicitly speaks of collapse or climate change, yet the signs are everywhere: planes carrying away the wealthy, the pervasive sense of emptiness and despair in the streets, and the languid abandonment embodied by other young people who appear later on. This striking Argentine debut paints a dystopian vision of the local—if not global—future, one that grows increasingly anxious as it unfolds, suggesting, as the song goes, that no one is likely to make it out alive.
The film could be seen as an extension of the opening scene of La Ciénaga, as if it took place after some ecological catastrophe—blended with a slightly hip, at times even ironic, portrait of twenty-somethings with no apparent future beyond drinking lukewarm soda, dipping their feet into murky water, and using drugs to pretend none of this is real.
But it is. Or, sooner or later, it will be.
