Pools (2025)
Wading is the Hardest Part
The college-crisis dramedy is just as much a genre as the superhero movie or the slasher flick, complete with traditions and tropes, shining examples and entries we’d rather forget. For every Iron Man there’s a Catwoman. 1980’s Friday the 13th stands the test of time; 2025’s I Know What You Did Last Summer remake will rot in a streaming carousel two weeks after hitting digital (rightfully so). We like to think that stories about teens enduring the gauntlet of higher education as a trial-run for adulthood have some inherent value, using outrageous situations and iconic lines (“One word: ‘Plastics’!”) to instill sticky life lessons about not selling out. Sadly, not every college flick can be The Graduate. Luckily, most of them aren’t as bad as Pools.
Aesthetically and performance-wise, writer/director Sam Hayes makes an impressive feature debut. As shot by DP Ben Hardwicke, the titular pools are hypnotic in their beauty and luxury, matching one character’s description of Chicago’s Lake Forest suburb as “the Beverly Hills of the Midwest”. The cast is a savvy assemblage of experienced young performers (Modern Family’s Ariel Winter, Tyler Alvarez of Orange is the New Black and Veronica Mars); actors who are currently “having a moment” (Mason Gooding of Scream VI and the low-key brilliant Heart Eyes); and those whose stars are about to go supernova (Odessa A’zion is in this fall’s Timothée Chalamet vehicle, Marty Supreme; Michael Vlamis will appear in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, out next year).
.None of these flashy elements are worth a damn without a strong script, and Pools repeatedly fails its swim test. The story centers on Kennedy (A’zion), a college student on the verge of losing her Economics scholarship due to an abysmal attendance record. The previous summer, her father died of a stroke—sending her on a spiral of aimless ennui from which her academic record may never recover. Compounding her frustrations is a broken campus AC system, which, in a clumsily bougie ode to Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing precipitates 24 hours of tensions, revelations, and a lawless blowing off of steam. Here, Kennedy wrangles a group of misfits from campus and convinces them to do a midnight raid of nearby mansions, whose swimming pools sit largely unused and unattended.
If you watch movies and television regularly, you’ve seen all this film has to offer, story-wise. The other students include a dumb jock (Gooding) who’s really just misunderstood; Kennedy’s former BFF (Winter), who became a snob and distanced herself after the dad’s funeral; a nerd (Alvarez) who is obsessed with getting good grades and staying clear of Kennedy’s Friend Zone; and another girl who wants to sleep with the jock but can’t for reasons too mundane to unravel here (think “love trapezoid” and you’ll get the picture). Over the course of two nights, the gang has the full run of one of the mansions; they eat and drink everything in sight, play dress-up with the owners’ clothes, screw in the owners’ beds, and generally trash the place.
Movies about wild house parties are not new, but Pools introduces an unsettling tweak to the formula that makes all the revelry and heartfelt revelation unpleasant to sit through. In Risky Business, Weird Science, Can’t Hardly Wait, etc., the ragers take place at the teen main character’s house whose parents are away; most of them end with a furious pre-dawn attempt to put things right, before Mom and Dad get home. Hayes infuses his movie with an ugly class prejudice that suggests Kennedy and her friends have the right to do what they do in a stranger’s home, by virtue of the fact that the owners have more money than they know what to do with.
Case in point: the mansion’s air conditioning is just as busted as the college’s. Some characters are astonished that homeowners Dale and Suzy (Raymond Fox and Lucinda Johnston, respectively) wouldn’t just write a check the moment they got a quote to replace their out-of-date unit. Because we spend so little time with them (they appear, briefly, early on and are presented as cartoon characters*) it’s impossible to say whether or not they’re A) genuine cheapskates, B) leveraged to the hilt, or C) dealing with any number of other adult problems that would prohibit them from laying out that kind of cash at a moment’s notice.
Kennedy and co. act as if Dale and Suzy are so rich as to be beyond empathetic regard. This juvenile non-logic sees economic disparity in terms of absolute numbers rather than proportion. Someone from the developing world, for example, might consider themselves fortunate to scrape by on a dollar per day; to them a group of college students with scholarships, a meal plan, and leisure time would be considered obscenely wealthy. If Kennedy, or any one of her friends, discovered that five such impoverished strangers had snuck into their homes** and spent the weekend consuming everything in sight, rifling through their private things, and stealing their cars—would they laugh about it? Would they care at all about the hopes, dreams, and early-life crises of whoever had violated them?
Similarly, imagine a person scraping and studying for an Economics scholarship—only to find that the prize has been awarded to a student who flaunts her “inability” to attend class because she’s sad; who bombs three separate offers to continue her cost-free education; and who flagrantly mocks the Dean of Students who (with all sincerity) regretfully informs said student that she’s been kicked out of school. In this scenario, Kennedy is no better (and is, in fact, far worse) than the millionaire couple who hesitates to replace their own AC.
Pools might have made a compelling case for its bizarre class politics, were it not so busy indulging in what Richard C. Meyer calls “LOL So Random” comedy, and foregoing any sense of recognizable reality. In one scene, Michael (Vlamis), a quirky AC repair guy, brings a bouquet of flowers to his boss as an apology for stealing a work van, going missing for the better part of a day, and upsetting a customer to the point of apoplexy. Michael genuinely seems to think his cutesy ploy will work. This is the same Michael who, several scenes later, offers Kennedy some pretty profound life advice. He’s also the same Michael who decides to rob the wrecked mansion since he knows the owners are away—and who, in the middle of doing so, decides he doesn’t want to rob the mansion, because that would be wrong.
The writer of this film would also have us believe that:
Elderly millionaires have modern pop albums on their turntables, just waiting to be played by twenty-something home invaders.
Upon returning home (a moment we’re denied seeing), Dale and Suzy wouldn’t immediately call the police to dust the place for prints—most notably the taunting “gift” Kennedy left on their front porch: an empty mini-bottle of Malört, with a flower sticking out the top.
Besides a C plot involving the jock’s surprisingly tender reason for staying in school for as long as he has (which could be the basis for a real movie), there’s little evidence that Sam Hayes’ experience of early-adult angst extends beyond hackneyed television dramas aimed at teen girls.
There are a handful of better films that are just as funny and oddly powerful as Pools aspires to be: Young Adult, Izzy Gets the Fuck Across Town, Palm Springs, Reality Bites, and Empire Records. Granted, these are mostly about older female characters, but they’re characters who’ve been so emotionally arrested as to act like the college kids in this movie (which is to say, all of about twelve years old).
The long and short of it is: Don’t dive into Pools looking for originality, personality, or (heaven forbid) profundity. You’ll crack your head on dry cement.
*Dale and Suzy are written as such buffoonish archetypes that they leave their Lake Forest mansion completely unprotected by keyless entry, home security, or any form of alarm—opting instead for a single physical key hidden in one of those fake plastic rocks that poor people think rich people use.
**For this thought experiment, we’ll assume Kennedy owns her apartment, house, etc., and is not just living in a dorm or in her mother’s house.
