Pools: Floatation Device Not Included

Time is a freaky thing to think about. We don't experience it in the way we expect—it's ephemeral, and moves into directions we can't grasp that leave pale aftershocks, of versions of who we used to be, yet can't be. Pools is a film that attempts to grapple with that disconnect, in the style of college coming of age, that’s fun from a moment to moment basis but doesn't quite cohere to a fine point.

Kennedy is a college student flailing on the edge of expulsion—one more class missed and she's out, so she gathers a ragtag group for a last night of pool hopping in the wealthy backyards of her city. But lingering beneath this escape is a cavern of trauma, anxiety, of mess and identity Kennedy has to face, one way or another. Pools is sweet and vibrant, and it sifts through its shades of self sabotage with a keen eye—with a litany of snap zooms, bright colors, stapled together with a snarky surrealism that doesn't intrude as much as it should; it's brief fight scenes, tobacco highs, the cardboard cutout narrator, that hint at a version of this that might've blossomed better with another pass or two.

Sam Hayes’s direction is great, his writing excels at pepping grief and avoidances, yet his film is done badly by a kind of frustrating non-committal to the ideas that it has. Pools is a film about grief that models on the tricks and trade of the wayward, youthful, Chicago based comedies John Hughes popularized in the 80s, and while Hayes and co. try their damndest to make it work, those tones cancel each other out more than don't. What works is in introducing the details, and in rooting them inside an electric specificity: breaking and entering and a touch of spice. There's something real here under its boozy convos between gasps of air, in being lost inside a shame spiral, but when it comes to exploring it? Not as such; these characters gesture at depth, but Pools has little to give besides what it can tease out of its performances.

Odessa A’Zion should've become a big star, like, three years ago, but it's nice to see the rest of you guys finally catching  up on her. Swimming in an oversized polo shirt, A’Zion brings a feral magnetism to Kennedy’s slouch to ambivalence, sinking to the bottom but with a purpose. She’s a prototypical cool girl, where that cool belies a chaos that anchors the film as a whole. The rest of the cast—Tyler Alvarez, Ariel Winter, Mason Gooding, Francesca Noel—flit and fly with level best charisma around her strange situation, but only Michael Vlamis, as the hot bodied air condition-eer, has enough impact to pierce at the veil of A’Zion’s malcontent. It's a shame then that the bulk of their scenes occupy the film’s last third. Because in those moments, at its best, Pools is a promising rumination of sunk costs bolstered by a generation of new talent, but mostly? The style overwhelms the substance, and the rest is just vapor.