This cheap and cheerful thriller is not as it sounds a prequel to Lady in the Water, but a vehicle for former teen idol Freddie Prinze Jr. as a faithless family man whose midlife crisis takes a fatal turn. While it’s nice to have the She’s All That and I Know What You Did Last Summer star back – apart from it being as jarring a reminder of one’s own aging as finding a grey pube or getting stuck in a Poang chair – The Girl in the Pool is a mediocre affair that gets caught in a no man’s land between escalating farce and tension drama.

Thomas (Prinze Jr.) is having a very bad day. He’s supposed to be celebrating his birthday, but he’s had to hide the corpse of his much younger mistress (Gabrielle Haugh) in a locker in his garden after she’s murdered in his pool in mysterious circumstances. Not only this, but when his wife Kristen (Monica Potter) returns it’s with the reveal that she’s throwing him a surprise birthday party at home. Thomas must spend the coming hours avoiding discovery from his family friends, which is easier said than done when his party-happy work colleagues pull out the booze and the drugs.

There is plenty milage in the concept of Dakota Gorman‘s film, but apart from Prinze Jr.’s increasingly frazzled spiral into suspicion and paranoia, the execution is lacking. It should feel like a constantly ratcheted spring waiting to snap. Somehow each escalation seems to chip away at the tension. The added flashbacks that slowly clue the viewer in to the circumstances merely pull us out of the moment when it becomes apparent the mystery is lacking. Compared to a film like Strange Darling which uses the non-linear strategy to genuinely surprising effect, the structure in The Girl in the Pool is slightly lacking.

The film does however offer some amusing moments of panic from Prinze Jr. as Thomas feels like he has to indulge in everything his douchey friends hand him. Seeing him under the influence as his friends, family, and his snarky father-in-law (Kevin Pollak, having a ball) all orbit around the concealed bodied is a lot of fun. Potter is less well served in an underwritten role as the long-suffering wife, and son and daughter Alex and Rose (Tyler Lawrence Gray and Brielle Barbusca) flit in and out to fit the narrative, the family dynamic clunkily realised.

This kind of cannonballing narrative can go like gangbusters; Good Time for example, or see The Coffee Table for a similar single-location idea taken to almost unbearable extremes. The Girl in the Pool is solid enough in the moment as a low-budget thriller, but there’s little that really sticks beyond seeing a former heartthrob in an unfamiliar environment.

Available on digital platforms from Mon 20 Jan 2025