Swim to Me 2025 Movie Review
Swim to Me (2025) dives deep into the murky waters of ambition, family trauma, and the pursuit of identity, creating an emotionally charged cinematic experience that balances raw realism with poetic visual storytelling. Directed by Anna Boden, best known for her ability to blend character-driven drama with atmospheric tension, the film feels both intimate and grand, capturing the quiet anguish of growing up under pressure and the yearning for personal freedom. Set against the competitive world of high school swimming, the movie goes beyond sports drama tropes—it’s a meditation on resilience, self-worth, and the delicate balance between love and control in a mother-daughter relationship. From its opening frame, Swim to Me exudes a haunting quietness, where every ripple in the water reflects an unspoken emotion and every breath taken underwater feels like both liberation and suffocation.
The story follows Amanda (played by Kaitlyn Dever), a teenage swimmer whose life has been carefully molded by her mother, Ellen (Jennifer Connelly), a former competitive swimmer whose Olympic dreams were shattered by injury decades earlier. Ellen’s obsession with reclaiming lost glory through her daughter creates the emotional backbone of the film. At first glance, Amanda seems like the ideal prodigy—disciplined, focused, and destined for collegiate success—but beneath the surface lies a teenager suffocating under expectations. The tension between mother and daughter builds slowly, echoing the ebb and flow of the pool’s current, until it erupts into moments of quiet devastation and desperate rebellion. Dever delivers a performance of astonishing subtlety; her expressive eyes capture Amanda’s constant inner struggle—between wanting to make her mother proud and yearning to define herself outside the lanes of competition. Connelly, in turn, gives Ellen a chilling intensity. She isn’t portrayed as a villain, but as a woman whose own unresolved pain has twisted her love into something controlling and destructive.
The screenplay, written by Boden and her longtime collaborator Ryan Fleck, avoids melodrama by grounding its emotional beats in authentic human behavior. The dialogue feels lived-in—often clipped and awkward, reflecting the emotional distance between the characters. Conversations between Ellen and Amanda are laced with microaggressions and backhanded encouragements that reveal more than overt arguments ever could. There’s a heartbreaking realism in scenes where Ellen pushes Amanda to practice longer, time herself again and again, and deny her own exhaustion, all under the guise of “wanting the best for you.” The script deftly explores how love, when warped by regret and perfectionism, can become indistinguishable from control.
Cinematographer Natasha Braier brings an ethereal beauty to the visuals, using reflections, underwater shots, and shifting light patterns to mirror Amanda’s emotional state. The pool becomes a character in itself—a shimmering, deceptive surface hiding the turbulence beneath. The underwater sequences are particularly mesmerizing, with muffled sounds and distorted visuals that convey Amanda’s sense of isolation and entrapment. Braier’s camera often lingers on close-ups of water droplets, trembling eyelashes, and trembling fingers gripping the edge of the pool—details that express vulnerability more powerfully than dialogue ever could. The blue and gray palette saturates the film in melancholy tones, while occasional bursts of sunlight symbolize fleeting hope. Every frame feels painterly yet grounded, capturing both the serenity and claustrophobia of Amanda’s world.
The film’s pacing is deliberately slow, mirroring the repetitive rhythm of swimming laps. For some viewers, this meditative tempo might feel demanding, but it serves a crucial narrative purpose. The monotony of training sessions becomes a metaphor for Amanda’s life—disciplined, cyclical, and devoid of spontaneity. Boden trusts her audience’s patience, allowing emotional revelations to emerge organically through silence, body language, and visual metaphors rather than exposition. There’s a particularly striking sequence halfway through the film where Amanda, overwhelmed after a major loss at a championship, drifts underwater for what feels like an eternity. The camera lingers as she stares upward at the refracted light filtering through the surface. It’s both a moment of surrender and a quiet act of defiance—a visual representation of someone teetering between drowning in expectation and surfacing toward self-realization.
Supporting performances add depth and texture to the story. Jacob Elordi plays Nick, a senior teammate whose easy charm hides his own insecurities about the sport and his future. His chemistry with Dever feels natural and understated, portraying a friendship that teeters on the edge of romance without ever succumbing to cliché. Nick becomes a mirror for Amanda—someone equally trapped in the machinery of ambition, yet more willing to question it. Their late-night conversations by the pool’s edge, where they confess fears and dreams, provide the film’s rare moments of warmth and levity. Meanwhile, veteran actor David Strathairn appears in a small but memorable role as Coach Turner, a stoic mentor who sees both talent and torment in Amanda. His quiet disapproval of Ellen’s methods introduces a moral counterpoint to the film’s exploration of ambition.
Boden’s direction ensures that every element—from the editing rhythm to the minimalist score by Nicholas Britell—works in harmony to sustain emotional tension. Britell’s music, dominated by delicate piano motifs and swelling strings, underscores the fragility of Amanda’s psyche. The score doesn’t dictate emotion but rather accompanies it, like the soft hum of breath beneath the water. Sound design, too, plays an essential role; the contrast between the deafening roar of the crowd during races and the muffled silence underwater encapsulates Amanda’s fractured perception of her world. In several scenes, we hear her heartbeat amplified, syncing with the rhythm of her strokes—turning physical exertion into a metaphor for emotional endurance.
Thematically, Swim to Me is about inheritance—not just genetic or familial, but emotional. It examines how trauma, disappointment, and longing can be passed down like heirlooms, shaping the next generation in unseen ways. Ellen’s obsession with success stems from her own unresolved grief, and Amanda’s struggle to please her mother becomes an unconscious attempt to heal that generational wound. The film also subtly critiques the culture of competitive sports, where mental health often takes a back seat to performance metrics. In portraying Amanda’s gradual awakening, Swim to Me becomes a quiet but powerful statement about the necessity of choosing self-compassion over external validation.
One of the film’s most compelling qualities is its refusal to offer easy redemption. There’s no triumphant race or neatly resolved reconciliation. Instead, Boden delivers a conclusion that feels both painful and liberating. In the final act, Amanda makes a choice that redefines her identity—not through rebellion, but through clarity. During the film’s climactic scene, she stands on the diving block, the crowd cheering, the lights blinding. But instead of leaping, she steps back. The silence that follows is deafening, a pause that speaks volumes. In that moment, she claims ownership of her life, even at the cost of everything her mother wanted for her. The ending avoids sentimentality, but it leaves a lasting emotional impact—a reminder that freedom sometimes comes not from winning, but from walking away.
What makes Swim to Me so affecting is its emotional honesty. It doesn’t vilify its characters or simplify their pain. Ellen is tragic precisely because she loves too fiercely, too selfishly; Amanda is sympathetic because her rebellion is quiet, born not of anger but of exhaustion. The film acknowledges that love can coexist with harm, and that healing often requires breaking away from those we love most. Boden’s nuanced storytelling allows each character to exist in shades of gray, and that moral ambiguity lingers long after the credits roll.
From a technical standpoint, the film is immaculate. The fluid camera work, organic lighting, and naturalistic performances create a level of immersion rarely achieved in sports dramas. The pool sequences, shot using a combination of practical effects and digital enhancement, are breathtakingly realistic, capturing every shimmer and distortion of light. Editor Andrew Weisblum ensures that transitions between scenes mimic the ebb and flow of water, creating a seamless visual rhythm. Each cut feels purposeful, guiding the audience deeper into Amanda’s psychological state without overt manipulation.
If there’s any criticism to be made, it’s that Swim to Me occasionally lingers too long on its introspective moments, which may test the patience of viewers expecting a more conventional narrative arc. However, this deliberate pacing is also what gives the film its power—it invites reflection rather than adrenaline. In an era dominated by loud, fast storytelling, Boden’s restraint feels like an act of artistic courage. She crafts a story that unfolds like a slow exhale, each scene rippling with emotional truth.
Ultimately, Swim to Me is a masterclass in understated filmmaking—a film that resonates not through grand gestures but through the smallest moments of recognition: the trembling lip before a confession, the soft echo of a dive, the quiet click of a stopwatch in an empty pool. It’s about the universal human desire to be seen, not as a reflection of someone else’s dreams, but as one’s authentic self. Kaitlyn Dever’s performance anchors the film with quiet brilliance, and Jennifer Connelly delivers one of her most complex roles in years. Together, they embody the cyclical dance of love and loss that defines the mother-daughter bond.
In the end, Swim to Me is less about swimming and more about surfacing—about finding the strength to breathe freely after years of being submerged in someone else’s expectations. It’s a poignant, beautifully crafted exploration of control, release, and the courage to choose one’s own path. By the time the credits roll, the audience isn’t left with the thrill of victory but with something far more profound: a sense of quiet catharsis, as if they, too, have finally come up for air.
