Sometimes things can happen, just like that,” says a suit-clad young boy as he snaps his fingers in David Lynch’s Fire Walk With Me. This sentiment sums up the weirdness of incidents unfolding in Sam Clemens’ The Drowned (2025). And while there are some sparse horror elements, The Drowned is really a supernatural mystery more than a supernatural or psychological horror.
The mystery of this movie is truly a mystery in the original sense of the word: beyond human understanding. Clemens has written a script which leaves a clever amount of ambiguity but ultimately not quite enough transparency to convey what it’s really wanting to.
The Drowned (2025) – It Begins With a Heist
The movie begins fittingly enough on a lone passenger boat out at sea, moving steadily but, in the vast omnipresence of the ocean; what is steady progress in terms of distance and time?
The cast is a remarkable ensemble, all seven characters portrayed with believable intensity. Alan Calton delivers a cryptic and paranoid lead character, Eric, with sketchy vibes to boot. The story of The Drowned eddies around a chartaceous treasure; a painting worth a considerable fortune.
Eric’s two accomplices, Matt (played by Dominic Vullliamy) and Paul (played by Michelangelo Fortuzzi) both bring their own baggage of paranoia and churlish privacy. The three of them are giddily eager to cash in for their cut on the looted artwork. But as the script unfolds, it’s clear that their agreed upon safehouse – an abandoned, rather spacious beach house, is brimming with haunting jolts and disconcerting creaks.
As the three first come together at the rural safehouse, it’s clear that the heist has run into a few glaring snafus. Namely, there are items and a certain accomplice unaccounted for; and the sturdiness of trust amongst the thieves sets off being already strained.
For a heist to be successful, all of the involved factors have to fulfill their role. One gear stopping in its spin can create a domino effect of consequences; this is certainly not a revelatory notion. Even the most strategically airlocked, best-laid heist is subject to human blunder. The flawless heist is one in which the thieves are never caught; or no one affected is ever the wiser. This is all in our flimsy understanding of “reality.” As the great Graham Greene once noted:
‘reality’ is a word rendered meaningless without the use of quotation marks.”
The fact that the heist has had some jarring hiccups which threaten to turn the whole operation into a gargantuan imbroglio becomes quickly overshadowed by a towering spectre of the ridiculously unexpected.
“Safehouse”
Any place designated “safe” can quickly become a prison, given extrinsic factors are collapsing around the characters-who are all depending on the safety of the safehouse. In The Drowned, the unexpected appearance of four stunning female characters doesn’t simply complicate the paranoia-it builds onto the ambiguity.
The script always teeters just beyond the shallow depth of psychological duress from pulling off a heist, to the supernatural. Voices, spectres, or wraiths from the water, and every feasible terror of the supernatural, is unfortunately the element owing to the film’s failings. The rapt heist storyline gets somewhat stymied with the entry of the attractive females, just around the halfway point.
Brisk Pacing, then…
Capable script pacing is a solid boon throughout The Drowned. But what ought to be easily conveyed by the action, moving through and past the movie’s midpoint, becomes a slog of ambiguous things that just seem to happen.
Considering that The Drowned is not a surreal Lynchian movie of abstractions or hyperbolic symbolism; it’s clear that Clemens is trying to convey a horror story. The mystery of each character becomes blurred after a series of incidents, wherein the three men and the strange women all form somewhat romantic interests with each other.
The tension wrought between the three thieves, Eric, Matt and Paul, is tempered with a droning and ominous threat of a mystery beyond their human control, or comprehension. This builds on the ambiguity of what is real and imagined. But by the film’s final scene, it’s apparent that something beyond the human realm of “reality” has altered the storyline; but a string of incidents leading to the final scene don’t quite add up to a nicely ribboned gift.
Exemplary Dialog and Casting
The dialogue is finely stitched over a precarious scenario, of a heist’s plans crumbling due to unforeseen events. And it truly serves as the The Drowned’s shining light, demonstrating how well-written dialogue can make a film excel regardless of budget or effects; the dialogue further exemplifies a good actor’s talent. The acting is quite commendable, making for a believable cast. Just how supernatural, or purely coincidental, the unforeseen events are-including the four female characters-hinges on the ambiguous elements of Clemens’ screenplay.
Submerged in Ambiguity
Unforeseen and unnatural events unfold in The Drowned, and the why is always just a bit too elusive. It’s not nearly as ambiguous, or abstract, as Fire Walk With Me; nor as Lovecraftian as Color Out of Space. And yet, creatures do indeed lurk in The Drowned-in subliminal flashes and screaming blips here and there.
What Clemens gets spot-on is the degree to the ambiguity: it’s clear something unnatural is afoot; but just how unnatural; how supernatural? While the reason is lacking, you’d be wrong to assume that The Drowned is an open-ended arthouse flick.
The Drowned is not an abstract piece, and the story of a haunted heist will have you examining every possible angle for days to come, or until you simply give up. The Drowned’s achievement is that everyone who sees it will walk away with a different level of mystery. Essentially, you’ll only get the gist of what happened.