Skolimowski wrote Deep End’s sexually charged and fable-like coming of age story of a young high school drop-out working in a decrepit London bath house. Expressionistically lurid colors and a celebrated soundtrack of early Cat Stevens and the avant-garde German rock group Can contribute to Deep End’s trance like qualities and feverish intensity. The little known John Moulder-Brown brings a fascinating ambiguity to his portrayal of the naïve young man who becomes the driving force for the film’s exploration of sexual perversity and desire. Skolimowski’s black humor and oblique mode of socio-cultural critique shapes the film’s depiction of the seedy, fetid underbelly of Swinging London and its casting of Fifties bombshell Diana Dors as a nightmare, yet also strangely comic, vision of unfettered lust. – HG