Chlorine
2021 · 17m
Directed by Melissa Anastasi
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: melancholic, tender
A neglected young girl steals from pregnant women at the local swimming pool, buying the attention she desperately craves.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise wants to be provocative—a child thief targeting vulnerability—but it settles into familiar indie melancholy instead of actually interrogating what's twisted about desire and neglect; Anastasi has the bones of something genuinely unsettling and refuses to break them.
Anastasi positions herself in the lineage of intimate character studies that find moral texture in small transgressions, and the film's restraint—its refusal to sensationalize the girl's hunger—marks a deliberate formal choice about where the camera allows us to look.
The singular move here is treating the theft not as plot catalyst but as a language of touch—each stolen object becomes a substitute for contact—and that reframing transforms what could be a conventional coming-of-age into something about the grammar of need itself.
Reviews
Some really terrific performances here, especially from the young Clementine Bell.