THE DROWNED movie poster | ©2025 Vertigo Releasing

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Alan Calton, Dominic Vulliamy, Michelangelo Fortuzzi, Lara Lemon, Sandrine Salyères, Lily Catalifo, Corrinne Wicks
Writer: Samuel Clemens
Director: Samuel Clemens
Distributor: Vertigo Releasing
Release Date: October 6, 2025 (U.K.), October 7, 2025 (U.S.)

THE DROWNED is set almost entirely (except for flashbacks) on and in the waters of a small island off the English coast.

Eric (Alan Calton) arrives here with a stolen painting in a watertight tube. He warily explores the designated hideout – a massive isolate house on the beach – gun drawn, reacting to strange sounds. He’s looking for Denice (Corrinne Wicks), but she doesn’t seem to be around, although her car is nearby.

When Eric finds Denice’s bracelet in a pool of bloody seawater, he suspects the worst but hides his discovery. We soon understand Eric’s logic – one of his partners in crime, Matt (Dominic Vulliamy), is Denice’s son, who would surely be distracted by the implications. Since Eric is having affairs with both Denise and Matt, the situation is even trickier.

When tech whiz Paul (Michelangelo Fortuzzi) greets the other two men, he is puzzled by Denice’s absence, as she’s meant to help them sell the painting and flee the country.

The strange sound reoccurs, freezing all three men in hunched positions and messing with their sense of time. Ominous items appear and disappear inside the house, including the bracelet.

While Matt is in the midst of confronting Eric about this, there is frantic banging on the door. This is a young woman, Opal (Lara Lemon), desperate to get help for her friend Pixie (Lily Catalifo), who’s out on the beach with a third comrade, Noë (Sandrine Salyères), after their boat capsized.

Although the men are hardly enthusiastic about having three strangers around, they can’t exactly leave the trio stranded outdoors overnight. Eric comes up with a reasonable-seeming strategy to send the young women away in the morning.

And then a whole lot more weird phenomena happens.

Writer/director Samuel Clemens (a great-great-great nephew of Mark Twain, whose real name was Samuel Clemens) gives THE DROWNED a striking visual style reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock thrillers of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Characters in the foreground are so clearly focused that they often pop from the background yet have old-school glamour. This seems appropriate in a film where many of the characters keep slipping in and out of hallucinations.

It’s not clear how long Clemens means for us to guess whether events are empirically real and the men are just tense and paranoid, or if we’re meant to come to the correct deduction early on that something supernatural is afoot. Since the bracelet shows up inside the house early on, and since multiple characters see it, we know we’re in a horror movie.

Clemens maintains a balance between regular uneasy interaction and the uncanny, working in a few effective jump scares. He also elicits pleasingly understated performances from the cast, with Calton radiating effortless leadership, and Vulliamy and Fortuzzi both exuding affable bewilderment. The women all convey the playful, flirty attitude of tourists on an adventure.

While the last shot loosely explains what’s been going on (for those who don’t grasp it immediately, a smidgen of Internet research will provide an answer), we – or at least this reviewer – can’t figure out what’s triggered the magic, much less why it functions with its particular timing and specifics. Without this narrative anchor, THE DROWNED is an intriguing mythic voyage, but we wind up feeling a little adrift.

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