There’s a luxuriantly sensuous high quality to the prose of British novelist Deborah Levy — a tactile grasp of land, climate and flesh — that feels intensely cinematic whereas studying it, in addition to an elliptical, concentrated inside psychology that feels liable to journey up any potential adapters. These rewards and dangers maintain true in “Swimming Dwelling,” a seductive however opaque adaptation of Levy’s Man Booker-shortlisted novel of the identical title, through which the creator’s knack for epigrammatic character portraiture and hothouse emotional battle yields extra superficially enigmatic outcomes on display screen. In his characteristic directing debut, British video artist Justin Anderson carries over a chicly serrated, off-kilter audiovisual sense from his commercials and short-form work; his scripting is much less assured, as is his command of a effective however under-tested ensemble led by Christopher Abbott, Mackenzie Davis and Ariane Labed.

Not too long ago premiered in competitors on the Rotterdam Movie Pageant, “Swimming Dwelling” could show too elusive and quick on feeling to attract the arthouse distributors which may in any other case be lured by its title actors and familiarly attractive premise: A free-spirited stranger aggravates tensions between a drifting couple over the course of a protracted, scorching Mediterranean trip. Sure adventurous streamers could take curiosity, By way of launch technique, it might act as a chaser to a higher-profile however equally humid Levy adaptation, Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s “Scorching Milk,” to be unveiled later this 12 months.

Anderson alerts his intent to discombobulate the viewer early and clearly, with opening credit over gauzy, upended pictures of a winding rural highway, over an arresting rating — by Greek digital artist Coti Ok. — pitched midway between choral hum and swarming insect assault. The highway, on an unidentified island in what seems to be Greece, results in a contemporary, high-end seaside villa being rented for the summer time by Josef (Abbott), a famend poet within the throes of a artistic drought, and his spouse Isabel (Davis), an intrepid conflict reporter who admits to feeling much less at residence together with her household than she does within the midst of a fight zone. Their sullen 15-year-old daughter Nina (Freya Hannan-Mills) is equally indifferent from each her mother and father. An costly household trip of mutual avoidance seems to await, brightened solely by the neon-hued quick shorts of taciturn villa handyman Vito (Anastasios Alexandropoulos).

When Josef and Isabel decide up household pal Laura (Nadine Labaki, in an oddly curtailed half) from the airport, nevertheless, they return to discover a stranger stark bare within the pool. Kitti (Labed) claims to be a pal of Vito’s, however she’s moderately extra within the household, instantly ingratiating herself with the in any other case closed-off Nina, and steadily revealing extra data of Josef and his previous than she initially lets on. Apparently a botanist, she collects wilted plant samples, admires root techniques for his or her brainless problem-solving, and microdoses on native toxic foliage with a view to make her personal physique an instrument of poisonous destruction. Maybe.

In Levy’s novel, the nude interloper is an outright, obsessive fan of Josef’s poetry. Right here, her motives are extra abstruse, to barely dimmed dramatic impact. Josef, a fiftysomething Polish Holocaust survivor within the Nineties-set novel, is right here significantly youthful, his trauma as an alternative rooted in unstated recollections of the Bosnian Warfare he fled as a toddler along with his mother and father. Anderson’s script doesn’t study this revised historic context a lot past the fixed faraway gaze that characterizes Abbott’s efficiency. If it colours his view of his spouse’s career in any respect, or hers of him, we’re left to intuit that of their brittle silences.

At any fee, Isabel has lengthy made her peace with Josef’s serial infidelity, discovering her personal launch in nightly excursions to an altogether mystifying nightclub the place dancers writhe in erotic torment, the place she observes however doesn’t work together. It’s a working joke or frustration of “Swimming Dwelling” that this scorching little island is heaving with sexual promise that goes untapped by the principals: “Simply because the window’s open, doesn’t imply you must climb by way of,” says Laura, a personality tasked with little greater than sometimes placing an outline to tacit character dynamics.

In the meantime, Vito is perpetually relandscaping the villa’s gardens with massive and farcically phallic auger drill, whereas the seashores and surrounding rocks are dotted with indolently nude males who can’t fairly be bothered with come-hither advances. “Take me with you,” Isabel calls out to 1 such granite-buttocked adonis. “I’m not going anyplace,” he replies indifferently. Thus is the movie’s unusual, languid erotic holding sample set. Regardless of such absurdist thrives, the dry, prickly humor of Levy’s writing isn’t a lot in proof. Anderson takes proceedings severely, however whilst issues tilt towards tragedy — the losses of the previous mirrored within the current — the movie doesn’t accrue a lot energy.

Its chief pleasures, then, lie in sensory particulars: the sun-fuzzed grain, citrussy colour tales and woozily flooded lighting of Simos Sarketzis’ cinematography, typically slicing the actors’ our bodies into alien close-ups; the persistently uncanny sonic intrusions of the rating, merging natural and artificial sounds into fidgety aural chaos; or the crisp strains and busy prints of Oliver Garcia’s costumes, which subtly define the category dynamics at play, whereas allowing all concerned to be elegant of their distress.