The Deep End is a retake of the classic film The Reckless Moment (1949), starring James Mason and Joan Bennett; both are based on the novel The Blank Wall (1949) by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. But in The Deep End the mother is trying to protect her son, not her daughter. The title for the film The Deep End, directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, is derived from the name of a male strip club in Reno, Nevada, where seventeen-year-old Beau Hall (played by Jonathan Tucker) has been going to have sex with Darby Reese (played by Josh Lucas). Margaret Hall (played by Tilda Swinton), Beau’s mother, evidently accepts the fact that her son is gay but rejects Reese as his lover, presumably because Beau drove home drunk from Reno one night and was nearly killed when his car got into an accident. Accordingly, she drives to The Deep End one afternoon to ask Reese, whom she has somehow discovered is Beau’s lover, not to see her son any more. Although Reese offers not to see Beau any more if she will pay him $5,000, she refuses. That same night Reese drives his Corvette to visit Beau in his home on the California side of Lake Tahoe. In pitch dark, after reluctantly sneaking out of his room to talk to Reese in the adjacent boathouse, the two scuffle. As Beau runs home, he is unaware that Reese falls from the boathouse pier, hits his head on an anchor, and dies. In the morning, Margaret goes outside, discovers the body, drags the corpse into a motorboat, ties the anchor to his feet, drives the motorboat to an inaccessible spot, and dumps him into Lake Tahoe. She then pays more of price for the cover-up than she perhaps anticipates in order to save her son from being charged with the crime while trying to maintain the appearance that everything is normal amid a family consisting of Beau, his two younger siblings, and her father-in-law, Jack (played by Peter Donat). The suspense is quite gripping for many filmviewers, as the genre is Hitchcockian, focusing as it does on Margaret’s emotions, which leap out of her facial expressions. Her first challenge comes when she discovers the victim’s parked Corvette, whereupon she returns to the watery grave so that she can dive into the water to recover the keys and then drive the vehicle away to a hotel parking lot. Her second challenge comes when Alek Spera (played by Goran Visnjic) suddenly appears with a videotape of Reese performing anal intercourse on her son, for which she must pay $50,000 or the tape will be turned over to the police. Although Margaret desperately tries to raise the money, ultimately hocking her wedding ring for one-fourth of the payoff, she persuades Spera that she simply cannot meet the extortion demand while taking care of her family, including her father-in-law, who has a heart attack at one critical point. Spera even assists Margaret in reviving Jack and later changes sides, refusing to collect the full amount. But Spera is the bagman for crime boss Carlie Nagle (played by Raymond J. Barry), who presents the third challenge when Spera reports that he has only $12,500 instead of $50,000. When Nagle shows up at the Hall residence to use strong-arm methods, Spera intervenes, there is a fight, and Spera kills > Nagle. After Spera drags Nagle into the latter’s car, he drives down the highway, loses control, and the overturned car pins him inside. Margaret gets her son to drive Spera’s car, since she does not know how to use a stick shift, and they follow the car. On discovering the overturned car, she rushes to help Spera, but he asks her to take back the $12,500 before he dies. After returning home, the nightmare is presumably over, though a few loose ends remain. Presumably the son believes that Margaret was having an affair with Spera because she has no sexual outlet while her husband is on a naval ship somewhere in the North Atlantic, whereas she hides her belief that Beau killed Reese. MH