Critic Reviews

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

Bit actor and sometime director Ari Gold and his co-writer/collaborator Elizabeth Bull conjure up a warm, wistful movie about nostalgia itself — its traps, and its rewards.

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.

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.

While not always dramatically successful, The Song of Sway Lake earns big points for originality. The film has a distinctive tone, look, and setting, which are supported by strong performances (one of them by the greatly missed Elizabeth Peña, who died in 2014, making this her final film appearance – somehow appropriate to this movie about how the past can impinge on the present).

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.

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.

The attractiveness of the scenery, and a quiet, dignified performance by Ms. Peña in what could now be her last movie appearance, wind up being the main redeeming values here.

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