‘A Bigger Splash’ a powerful domestic drama

‘A Bigger Splash’ a powerful domestic drama

“A Bigger Splash” takes four characters with strong needs, drops them into a single location and invites us to watch what happens.

With nothing to hold the audience but the question of how these characters will get along and what they will feel, director Luca Guadagnini keeps audience attention glued to the screen for the full two-hour running time.

Harry is an irrepressible extrovert, talking constantly, full of warmth, enthusiasm and ebullience, so if I tell you he’s played by Ralph Fiennes, that might sound a little weird, or at least surprising.

Known initially as aloof, melancholy and lizard-lipped onscreen, he has opened up an entire other side of himself and has become — not just the guy you’d hire to play a Nazi or a damaged depressive, but a delightful presence with at least double the range than as previously thought.

Instead of playing the title character “Coriolanus” (2011) as a cerebral patrician, he played him as a hard-edged man of action.

In “A Bigger Splash,” he’s uncontainable, singing karaoke, dancing, laughing, throwing off his clothes and giving out enormous conversational energy at all times, despite the fact that he’s talking to one character who can’t answer and another who’s taciturn by nature and wishes he’d go away.

Guadagnino and screenwriter David Kajganich (from a story written by Alain Page) keep the audience in the head space of these four distinct characters.

The filmmakers gain our trust early in the film, and from there we’re willing to take the journey, whether it’s to flashbacks to Marianne’s music heyday or to sights of Fiennes dipping his knees, clapping his hands and dancing like a very happy (though not benign) goofball.

The movie shows how, if characters are properly built, acted and made real, they become as interesting as people we know, so let them dance if they feel like it.