There is a certain kind of party movie that sneaks up on you. It arrives loud and goofy, dressed in neon energy and soaked with bad decisions, then slowly reveals the bruise underneath the glitter. Pools lives in that space. It is playful and brazen and impulsive, and then it turns tender in a way that made me sit up a little straighter. You can feel the film rooting for its own characters, especially its lead, a young woman who is sprinting through the night because standing still would mean feeling everything at once.
At first glance it might look like the sort of teen escapade that filled multiplexes around ten years ago. A group of college kids on a chaotic quest, jumping fences, running from angry homeowners, diving into water that does not belong to them. There is music and sweat and a lot of bad plans. What gives Pools its own pulse is how honestly it sits with grief. It is not preachy about loss. It lets the ache seep into the party until the two cannot be separated.
Odessa Azion carries that ache. She has a spark that feels unplanned in the best way, as if emotion just slips out of her before she can mask it. If you saw Fresh Kills you might already know she is having a moment, and this film only pushes that momentum forward. She plays Kennedy, a brilliant college student who earned her scholarship by crushing exams and never missing a beat. Then her father died a year earlier, and the gears that once clicked in perfect order start grinding. She stops going to class. She sleeps through days. She drifts. For anyone who has ever tried to keep a schedule while their heart refuses to cooperate, her mess feels true.
The school threatens to revoke her scholarship if she does not turn up. A counselor named Mrs Lewis puts the stakes on the table with a quiet firmness. One more chance. Show up or lose what you have built. You think Kennedy will do the sensible thing because she used to be that person. Then she chooses the opposite. She goes looking for a good time, or at least for distraction that looks like joy. That choice is the movie. It is the engine that sends her across a wealthy suburb with a pack of friends who are friends mostly because they happened to be in the same orbit on the same night.
There is Reed, who was once the big man on campus, and still treats his body like a project he can solve. He has the one useful trait of being old enough to buy alcohol. There is Blake, a straight arrow with medical school dreams and a soft spot for people who are cracking. There is Delaney, who knows Reed too well, and Shane, who would like to know him better. They move as a five person storm. They buy tiny bottles of Malort, that bitter Chicago rite of passage, and they take off in their swimsuits with the shameless confidence of people who believe that dawn will forgive everything they do at night.
The ritual they invent is simple. Scale a fence. Slip into a backyard pool. Shock the owners. Laugh and run. Repeat. They treat the suburb like a circuit board and jump from light to light. If you have ever seen The Swimmer with Burt Lancaster, the premise will ring a bell. That film is a lonely odyssey through an idea of success that falls apart in the light. Pools borrows the shape of that journey but not the sermon. It is not a takedown of the American Dream. It is not scolding anyone for chasing a life that gleams. If anything it pushes back against the sort of tidy educational path that pretends to be the only legitimate plan, and it opens a sideways door toward creativity and art and risk.
More than that, it uses the image of swimming from pool to pool as a way to map Kennedy’s longing. Lancaster tried to swim home to a life that was already gone. Kennedy is not going home so much as she is swimming toward the memory of her father and hoping she can feel him again for a second. It lands. The night becomes a medium, a place where the past might drift close if you keep moving fast enough and refuse to let the sadness catch its breath.
The craft in the first half sparkles. You can see the filmmaker joyous about motion. There are long takes that keep pace with the kids as they sprint across lawns and back alleys. The camera does not hover or instruct. It chases. It leans into the chaos and lets the group invent the rhythm. The water looks unreal, like panes of blue glass lit from within. Whenever they dive in, the movie relaxes for a beat, as if the pool is the only place where silence is possible. It is beautiful without being fussy. The images feel lived in and a little reckless.
Eventually the group finds a giant empty house owned by a man named Dale. The place is a playground of rooms and staircases and echoing corners. They tear through it with the goofy royalty of kids who have never had that kind of space to themselves. There is a lovely, mischievous energy in those scenes. I kept thinking of Peter Pan and the lost boys, children who refuse to be told that growing up is the only path worth walking. It is intoxicating. For a while you might even forget that Kennedy is running from something that will not stop trailing her, no matter how many fences she climbs.
It is not all adrenaline. The film knows when to breathe, and as the night wears on, the pace starts to slow. That shift is intentional. The jokes stretch a little longer. The arguments feel heavier. There is a framing device involving a cardboard standee that seems like it might evolve into something more meaningful. It never quite gets there. It works as a silly bit, and it does add a texture of youthful absurdity, but it also feels like a promise the movie forgets to keep.
Some of the stylistic swagger in the first stretch also fades as we move along. Those charged zooms that punch the energy up early on are mostly gone by the midpoint. The look settles into a calmer register. The camera stops racing and sits with the characters as they talk through their romantic nerves and their fear of change. That is honest to who they are. Teenagers spend a lot of time stepping on their own feelings and then trying to pick them up off the floor. Still, the visual language becomes more familiar during these scenes, and you can feel the original spark dim slightly.
Then a new presence enters near the end, an air conditioning repairman played by Michael Vlamis. He is not a savior and the movie is not asking him to be one. He is more like a gentle reminder that the world is larger than the bubble these kids have created, and that kindness can be simple and without scorekeeping. His scenes help the story find a second wind. The tone grows quieter and steadier. The comedy stops elbowing its way to the front. You can feel Kennedy choose to face something she has been trying to outrun since the first minute.
There are places where the script gets stuck. A few gags go on a beat too long. Some of the teen dilemmas arrive on schedule, like checkpoints on a familiar route. It is not fatal. These are bumps on a road that is otherwise driven with care. What keeps the story anchored is its compassion for Kennedy and for anyone who recognizes themselves in her scattered decisions. The movie does not punish her for grieving badly. It does not offer tidy answers or a single moral. It lets her be messy and brave and wrong and still deserving of love.
That generosity extends to the cast around her. Mason Gooding brings a sincere presence to Reed. He is not just a walking muscle joke. There is a gentleness there, a wish to be helpful, and also a confusion about how to do that without hurting people he cares about. Tyler Alvarez’s Blake could have been a cardboard good kid. Instead he is awkward and serious and often the one person who says the thing that needs to be said. Ariel Winter and Francesca Noel find different shades of desire and irritation in Delaney and Shane. The group chemistry is believably lopsided. They are not best friends united by a grand purpose. They are five people who collide and make a night together because that is what youth allows.
As for Azion, the camera likes her. It simply does. She can erupt without warning, and then the next moment she turns small and still, and you want to lean in. There is an unpredictability to her choices that feels like the way emotions truly move through a person. She can be spiky and tender within a single minute. When the film asks her to carry raw grief, she does not press too hard. She lets it wash over her in a way that makes the space around her feel charged. That kind of performance has an echo. It leaves traces in every scene even when she is not speaking.
The setting matters as well. Lake Forest and the surrounding suburbs are rendered with a sharp eye for class and architecture without turning the place into a caricature. Gated edges. Perfect grass. Blue rectangles of water gleaming behind fences. It is beautiful, like a catalog page, and it is also a little airless. The kids clamber over walls that represent both wealth and the allure of transgression. There is a mild danger in the trespassing, of course, but it is also a search for oxygen. The geography becomes a map of who is allowed where, and who decides that.
Water is a character in its own right. Every pool is a door. The quiet under the surface is different in each one. Sometimes it feels like a whisper from the past, and sometimes it is a mirror that refuses to flatter. When Kennedy dives, the film gives her a moment that belongs only to her. It is no accident that the most striking images are the ones where she is suspended in blue light, hair drifting, breath held. Those shots carry a promise that the movie fulfills in its last stretch. You cannot stay underwater forever. You have to come up. The question is what you bring with you when you do.
The editing lets scenes breathe. The night unfolds in chapters rather than as a relentless barrage, so we are never stranded in noise. That balance makes the rowdy sequences land harder because the quiet ones have weight. The sound design is not flashy, but it notices things. Wet footprints on tile. The wheeze of an air unit kicking on. Laughter that snaps too quickly into silence when someone says the wrong thing. These details ground the euphoria. They keep the party honest.
Where the film engages with the idea of college and work, it does so without scolding. There is a whisper running through it that some people are built for the tidy ladder, and some are not, and both groups deserve respect. Kennedy once excelled at the ladder. She might still return to it in a different form. What matters here is that she gives herself a night to be alive without converting that aliveness into a bullet point on a resume. There is freedom in that. There is also danger. The movie holds both truths at once and refuses to pretend the choice is simple.
Grief is the core. Not grief as a cinematic trick, but the kind that messes up your calendar and your appetite. The kind that makes you talk to your friends in a way that confuses them because they cannot follow the wave you are riding. Pools treats grief like weather. You cannot control it, but you can decide whether to seek shelter or let it soak you until you are shivering. Kennedy does a little of both. She runs. She hides. She laughs too loudly. She jumps into strangers pools. Eventually she stands still. The road from frantic motion to quiet acceptance is not straight, and the film knows that.
By the time the sun thinks about rising, something in her face has changed. It is not an easy miracle. It is smaller and more believable than that. She looks ready to carry the memory of her father without letting it drown her. You can call that maturity. You can call it grace. The film calls it a choice. It is one of the loveliest things about this story that it does not ask for approval after showing that choice. It simply witnesses it.
A few moments falter. A running bit or two overstays its welcome. The story occasionally pulls out a familiar teen roadblock and asks us to step over it again. These are ordinary flaws. What sticks when the credits roll is the feeling of having watched a young woman move through a long night and find a way to make morning bearable. The laughter helps. The water helps. The people around her help in their imperfect ways. Most of all, her own willingness to stop pretending she is fine opens a door.
You could watch Pools for its vibes alone and have a good time. The spectacle of high energy kids juking through backyards. The sight of a suburban mansion turned into a temporary playground. The glow of blue water in the dark. That is all there, and it is delivered with verve. If you stay with it, you will find a second film inside the party, one that speaks quietly about memory and longing and the odd ways we honor those we love when we cannot bear to say their names out loud.
Odessa Azion makes that inner film visible. She is the kind of actor who can make you think she is about to make a reckless choice and then show you the tenderness behind why she is making it. The camera leans toward her because she gives it many different selves to see. It is the sort of performance that makes an already spirited feature feel essential.
In the end, Pools earns its title. It is a collection of clear spaces where people go to feel lighter for a moment, and also a set of depths that you can only face when you are ready to hold your breath and look down. The movie splashes and laughs and then finally stands still by the edge. It asks nothing dramatic of you as a viewer. Just watch this girl try. Watch her fail a little. Watch her take a step you recognize. That is plenty.
For all its stumbles, this is a picture worth diving into. It remembers that youth is as much sorrow as it is fun, that laughter can be a life raft, and that the simplest shot of a person floating can hold more truth than any lecture. When the last scene lands, you may find yourself thinking about your own nights of running hard and hoping the morning would be gentle. Pools does not promise gentle. It promises honest. And then it keeps that promise.
