Like The Swimmer

Good analogy.

Yes, also reminded me of the Swimmer, which is like a psychological horror film. This film, as well, had elements of psychological horror, especially when the camera, from a distance, fixes on the little boy after the ladder incident.
But, the pools! Yup: La Ciénaga is like The Swimmer meets Chekhov's fetid swimming pool & Antonioni's sense of amorphous, omnipresent doom.
There's so few posts on this board about this great film. IMO, La Ciénaga is a deep, original & significant film & I'd like to see more of this director's works.

The Swimmer was based on a brilliant short story by John Cheever not Raymond Carver. A sort of understandable mistake (both outstanding writers who taught & drank together
at Iowa). The movie was a piece of crap Hollywood vanity production for an over-aged beefcake Burt Lancaster. Don't see any resemblance here.

Thanks for the analogy. It has been years since I have seen "The Swimmer," a film which really fascinated me resulting in my watching it several times with new insights on each occasion. It was rather pleasantly comic--such as the "I kissed that safety pin" remark--but slowly metamorphosed into a sleazy, uncomfortable tragic saga of a man who has been putting on a show which soon decays into unsavory reality. The nasty pool in which he finally dunks his wounded body symbolizes the sickness of his existence. So it is with "La Ciénaga"--the slow revelation of the unhealthy truth about the families. Of course the latter film is much more complex and certainly gets down and dirty rather soon into the plot. The element of racism struck me as very authentic. The scene where poor Lucho, the most likeable of all the characters, falls to his death is gut wrenching and shocking.