Swimfan: Review By DarkMaster24

Starring Jesse Bradford and Erika Christen, Swimfan tells the enticing story of a young, impressive swimmer in the process of getting a scholarship to Stanford; a seemingly perfect life, until he is seduced and consequently has sex with the mysterious Madison Bell in his school's swimming pool-the climactic point in this scene was when Madison tells Ben to tell her he loves her. Apparently, in the spur of the moment, he tells her he does and as a result, she begins to stalk him and make his life hell. She uses deceitful tactics to get him kicked off from the swim team, fired from his job, and even attempts to murder his beautiful girlfriend.

Ben does some research and learns that the girl is in love with him because she's attempting to fill in the emptiness of her life since her former boyfriend went into a coma after a tragic accident.

With stellar acting, an interesting storyline, melodious music, and cool make-out scenes, Swimfan is one of the better underrated movies there is. It has some frightening moments, combined with a great soundtrack, which is perfectly complemented by the edginess of the story. I particularly liked the scene where Ben was swimming in the pool and bumps into his dead friend and subsequently gets framed from the murder. That was genuinely unexpected and thus scary! It really does its job as a thriller movie by making you nervous and having you wonder what's going to happen next.

The movie was released in 2002, but still holds up today as one of the nicer thriller movies of this decade. Swimfan is still one of my favorite movies of its genre despite being released nearly seven years ago and I even purchased it out of a desire to see it again. I'd recommend it to anyone who's looking for a thriller or wants to watch a movie that features a scary, crazy stalker chick, who only shows the emotion of anger.

The story builds up and escalates as Madison gets more frustrated when Ben declines her offers of getting involved romantically with him; just the expressions on her face themselves are very scary and Erika Christensen is an amazing actress for being able to accomplish that. It's very rare for an actor to have that affect on me.

It reminded me a lot of Fatal Attraction, but ironically, I liked this movie a bit better, even though Fatal Attraction itself is a classic. I think this movie didn't get the credit it deserved, but I do have a few complaints about the movie, as minor as they are.

For one, the movie doesn't show enough violence; I know many people like this about the movie, but I myself was extremely curious to see how exactly she killed Josh when he was in the movie. It hints strongly that she bludgeoned him with the baseball bat found in Ben's locker, but other than that you don't really know what caused his death-either he drowned in the pool or the blow he sustained from the baseball bat killed him. Like I said, it's just minor but I was dying to know how exactly he died and, since the movie doesn't show that, we are left wondering.

Another gripe I have is that the movie doesn't make us care enough about the girlfriend. It's like you don't feel that Ben and his girlfriend truley care about each other as the movie was meant to suggest. The girlfriend never seems to fully recover after Ben cheated on her and always seems to still be hurting about it, even after Madison's out of the picture. This is also a minor problem, but it'd be nice if the movie made you feel a stronger connection to her.