The Song of Sway Lake

The film’s absurdly strong performances, music, and aesthetics all bring to life a wonderful film you won’t want to miss.

The film seems unclear on how to unpack all its baggage, but the sense of detail and place carry the day.

Narratively, The Song of Sway Lake doesn’t have much going for it but when it comes to capturing the tone of a specific locale, the approach of director Ari Gold is without peer.

Gold does an excellent job of evoking the past. But there’s nothing really holding the film’s most poignant moments together: no narrative drive, and no sense of a larger world. This song has a catchy melody, but the arrangement is a mess.

Ari Gold’s The Song of Sway Lake is saturated with a kind of melancholy nostalgia, and viewers who can accept that will find other virtues as well in this flawed film. It’s a story of familial unhappiness passing down through generations, impressive before it begins to lose focus.

Despite Ari Gold’s knack for visual flourishes that capture a sense of place seemingly outside of time, The Song of Sway Lake plays like several disparate melodies overlapping one another.

The Song of Sway Lake never finds a thematic center around which to pivot its action.