Swung

Direc­tor Col­in Kennedy’s debut fea­ture tack­les a nov­el sub­ject: peo­ple in Glas­gow hav­ing sex with­out the aid of Scar­lett Johans­son turn­ing up in a van.

Unlike Under the Skin, this adap­ta­tion of Ewan Morrison’s 2007 nov­el fol­lows thir­tysome­thing cou­ple David (Owen McDon­nell) and Alice (Ele­na Anaya), whose floun­der­ing love life (the film opens with an erec­tile dys­func­tion joke) pro­vokes excur­sions into unfa­mil­iar sex­u­al ter­ri­to­ry, name­ly the world of swinging.

Both have dif­fer­ent motives. Alice is look­ing for a sto­ry for her mag­a­zine job, where she’s strug­gling to stand out. Mean­while, David is an unem­ployed design­er who’s not trust­ed to look after his daugh­ter by his ex-wife. Feel­ings of inad­e­qua­cy in oth­er areas of life lead to impo­ten­cy in the bed­room. He finds that watch­ing oth­er peo­ple have sex – though not nec­es­sar­i­ly join­ing in with the swing­ing strangers – tem­porar­i­ly sub­dues his med­ical issue. As the pair’s rela­tion­ship is pushed to more extreme lim­its, Alice emerges as the more like­ly to ven­ture into the unknown; a hotel orgy presided over by enig­mat­ic matron Dol­ly Adams (Eliz­a­beth McGov­ern), whose recent­ly depart­ed real-life inspi­ra­tion receives a ded­i­ca­tion in the clos­ing credits.

Being a dra­ma about a mid­dle class cou­ple who become estranged through per­verse sex­u­al encoun­ters, Swung can’t help but call to mind Eyes Wide Shut. In exe­cu­tion, how­ev­er, Swung is a lethar­gic, dour affair run­ning on ris­i­ble dia­logue, stiff per­for­mances, eye-rolling visu­al gags (in one scene David watch­es a YouTube video about erec­tile dys­func­tion while peel­ing car­rots). Worse still, its trans­gres­sive sub­ject mat­ter ulti­mate­ly gives way to a dis­ap­point­ing­ly con­ser­v­a­tive streak.