Film Review: The Witches of Pool Bottom Review

Young British filmmaker Ava Bounds turns the brutal self-consciousness of adolescence into literal monsters in a seven-minute burst of absurdist comedy that is funny, confrontational, and refreshingly uninterested in behaving itself.

There is perhaps no location more ruthlessly designed to expose teenage insecurity than a public swimming pool. Fluorescent light. Bare skin. Nowhere to hide. Everyone seemingly looking at everyone else while pretending not to.

Writer-director Ava Bounds understands that particular adolescent horror all too well in The Witches of Pool Bottom, a wonderfully strange seven-minute short that takes the internal monologue of a self-conscious teenage girl and drags it, kicking and screaming, into physical form. Bounds' film stars Anja Cilia as Rachel, a shy teenager who arrives at a crowded public pool in a red bikini and almost immediately feels as though every eye in the room has turned toward her. 

Then Rachel dives into the water.

The pool empties.

And her insecurities climb out.

Waiting at the bottom are three girls wearing the same red bikini, each embodying something Rachel has apparently been taught to fear about her own body: acne, body hair and fatness. Rather than leaving those anxieties as metaphor, Bounds transforms them into opponents in an increasingly outrageous confrontation.

It is an audaciously simple idea, and that simplicity is part of the film's strength. The Witches of Pool Bottom does not need a lecture about impossible beauty standards because its premise already contains the argument. Rachel has absorbed so many rules about what a female body is permitted to look like that her mind effectively manufactures monsters out of perfectly ordinary human characteristics.

The cleverness is that the monsters aren't really monsters.

The standards are.

Bounds has described the film as an exaggeration of the constant self-monitoring teenage girls learn to perform — watching their bodies, appetites and reflections as though these things require continuous correction. She has also been clear that the comedy isn't there simply to make the subject more palatable; she uses absurdity to expose how irrational, and potentially cruel, those expectations become when taken seriously.

That distinction matters.

There are plenty of well-meaning films about body positivity that become so careful with their message that the message begins to feel manufactured. The Witches of Pool Bottom takes another route entirely. It gets weird.

Very weird.

Hair becomes threatening. Skin becomes spectacle. The familiar discomfort of wearing a swimsuit becomes the basis for something resembling a miniature fantasy-action showdown. The film's public materials describe an "outrageous pool showdown," and Bounds' production has gleefully advertised its dancing hair monsters and flying face masks.

That willingness to embrace silliness gives the material an energy that a solemn approach would almost certainly have diminished.

Bounds is interested not only in what teenage girls fear about themselves, but in the absurdity of having been taught to fear those things in the first place.

Rachel therefore makes an effective center for the film precisely because her insecurity is recognizable before anything supernatural happens. Cilia is asked to approach the role physically as well as emotionally, with the production emphasizing movement and stunt work as Rachel's private anxieties become external adversaries. The role gave Cilia the opportunity to explore a more physically demanding style of performance than she had previously, according to production materials.

The supporting cast includes Anastasiya Ador, Georgia Baines, Frankie Bounds and Sydney Miede, whose characters populate the strange manifestation of Rachel's fears. 

But the film's sharpest stroke is arguably refusing to make those bodies themselves the joke. That's an important line to walk when you're making a comedy involving acne, hair and weight. The wrong tone could easily reinforce precisely the ideas the film hopes to dismantle. Bounds' target, however, is not the supposedly "imperfect" body. It is the culture that has convinced Rachel such imperfections require panic in the first place.

The title, The Witches of Pool Bottom, is especially good in that regard. Witches have traditionally been women whose bodies, ages, appearances or behaviors exist outside accepted boundaries. Here, that language gets repurposed inside the imagination of a teenager who has already learned which versions of femininity society supposedly wants her to banish.

The film's antagonists can consequently be read less as villains than distorted reflections.

Rachel is fighting herself because she has been taught to.

That gives all the absurdity underneath the diving boards and bikinis a rather painful foundation.

Bounds was still a teenager when developing the story and has described it as personally connected to her own struggles with body image. Her previous screenplay statement was similarly direct: adolescence can be exciting, but it is also riddled with fear, and she wanted young people to be capable of laughing at the insecurities that threaten to consume them rather than allowing those insecurities to dictate their lives. 

It is difficult not to feel that generational proximity in the premise.

This does not feel like an older filmmaker standing outside teenage culture and explaining adolescence to teenagers. It feels like somebody still close enough to the experience to remember its ridiculous internal logic: one blemish can feel catastrophic; one glance from another person can become a referendum on your entire body; a trip to the swimming pool can somehow acquire the emotional stakes of entering a gladiatorial arena.

Bounds simply makes the gladiatorial arena literal.

At only seven minutes, The Witches of Pool Bottom has little interest in psychological over-explanation. Its premise works precisely because the metaphor arrives quickly and then commits wholeheartedly to its own madness.

If there is an inherent limitation, it is the same one that accompanies many concept-driven shorts: once the central metaphor announces itself, there isn't enormous room for ambiguity. The audience understands what the witches represent almost immediately. Yet Bounds compensates for that directness with tonal personality. The film does not merely want the audience to understand the message. It wants them to experience how ludicrous the underlying rules are.

And sometimes ridicule is a particularly effective form of rebellion.

There is also something encouraging about Bounds' lack of reverence toward a subject filmmakers frequently approach with solemnity. The beauty industry already treats the female body with exhausting seriousness — measuring it, correcting it, selling to it and endlessly identifying problems that conveniently require purchased solutions. Turning that machinery into farce may be more subversive than offering another inspirational speech about learning to love yourself.

Bounds is part of a young British filmmaking generation increasingly comfortable combining emotional sincerity with stylistic eccentricity. She became the youngest recipient of the IMDb New Filmmaker Award at 15 and is now developing her first feature with Channel 4 Skills. Her work has been described as blending dark comedy, surreal storytelling and emotional honesty — three qualities that neatly describe what The Witches of Pool Bottom is attempting here.

Most promising is the sense that Bounds already understands something many filmmakers take much longer to discover: a serious idea does not require a serious-looking film.

Sometimes a teenage girl's terror of not being beautiful enough deserves tenderness.

Sometimes it deserves analysis.

And sometimes it deserves three bikini-clad manifestations crawling out of an empty swimming pool so somebody can finally tell them to shut up.

The Witches of Pool Bottom chooses the third option.

The result is messy, mischievous and deliberately excessive — a compact piece of surreal comedy that recognizes just how horrifying adolescence can feel while refusing to let those horrors have the final word. Beneath all the hair, acne, bikinis and absurdity is a deceptively humane idea: perhaps freedom doesn't come from finally achieving the perfect body.

Perhaps it comes from realizing there was never anything monstrous hiding in it to begin with.

“The Witches of Pool Bottom,” written and directed by Ava Bounds and starring Anja Cilia, Anastasiya Ador, Georgia Baines, Frankie Bounds and Sydney Miede, is scheduled to screen at the 2026 HollyShorts Film Festival on Aug. 18 at the TCL Chinese 6 Theatres in Hollywood. The seven-minute short is also slated for the BIFA- and BAFTA-qualifying Bolton Film Festival.