Night Swim
This January horror film has good form off the board, but ultimately belly flops
The plot and the evil water quickly goes down the drain in middling horror Night Swim.
The Waller family is looking for a place to start over. Dad Ray (Wyatt Russell) is a former Major League Baseball player whose career was cut short by a Multiple sclerosis diagnosis. Mom Eve (Kerry Condon) is used to keeping the family together, but now is hoping for stability for her kids and herself after years of nomadic living following Ray from team to team.
When they find a spacious house with a massive pool for a bargain in Minnesota, Ray pushes for the family to settle there. Because the internet evidently doesn’t exist, no one thinks to Google this house and find out why a giant home with a beautiful spring-fed pool is being sold at a bargain. Instead, the family dives right in, relocating to the house and opening up the pool.
Immediately, odd things begin to happen. Ray’s MS seems to go into remission. He’s stronger, healing quickly, and already dreaming of resuming his baseball career. But while water therapy seems to work out for Ray, the rest of the family is not as fortunate. The pool lights flicker. There are a few near-drownings. Oh, and the kids are seeing creepy people in the drain filters.
Ray says there’s nothing to worry about, but Eve isn’t so sure. Can they get to the bottom of this mystery without drowning?
Look, it’s January. Historically, this is when studios dump films that they know aren’t very good. Occasionally, a film like M3GAN comes along that is both smart and creepy, but usually, you’re looking at a low-effort jump scare flick like The Boy, Knock at the Cabin, or One Missed Call. Night Swim isn’t a total write-off, but it’s also boring, silly, and overall not worth paying box office prices for.
Basically, this flick is The Amityville Pool Party. Adapted from director Bryce McGuire’s short of the same name, which you can still find on YouTube, Night Swim is a prime example of how difficult it is to adapt short-form horror to feature length. In a short horror movie, you’ve got five-to-ten minutes to set up one good scare. The Pool Eats You works in a short horror movie because it’s a punchy little idea. Watching the pool eat people (or at least attempt to) for 90 minutes, however, is pretty tedious.
McGuire’s biggest problem is that in expanding the idea of a killer pool, he opens himself up to questions that he and the film have no answers for. Why is the water evil? If the evil water is in the community, does it hurt anything else? People have been disappearing in this pool for decades and…no one thought maybe they should pour some concrete and make an evil basketball court instead? Night Swim doesn’t want you to think about that. In fact, Night Swim would prefer if you don’t think about much while watching.
Night Swim also borrows heavily from horror films that came before it, in a way that has you anticipating the scares. The entire premise feels like a SyFy channel rip-off of Amityville, but there are distinct scares that seem like they’re taken directly from It and Get Out. By aping these memorable moments, Night Swim spoils that a jump scare is coming which deflates the power of the scare. If you’re a fan of horror, you’ll be able to map out the whole plot within about 10 minutes, which leaves you 80 minutes to seethe that nothing new or interesting is happening.
Think of 10 creepy things that could happen in a pool. That’s probably 5 more than Night Swim bothers to come up with. And while predictability and repetition are annoying, it’s exacerbated by a PG-13 rating. There’s barely any blood in Night Swim and the scares that are there are defanged by the studio’s need to make the movie as palatable as possible to all audiences. The result is a movie that is appropriate for teens and adults, but will also bore teens and adults.
This is a shame because stars Russell and Condon are doing their level best to make the material work. For the first thirty minutes, we’re in a family drama about a couple that’s trying to fix issues and start a new chapter. We get insight into the family dynamics. We get stories about little family signals that seem as though they might be significant later. Hell, we even get a Christian Swim Team that I thought might at least end in a chlorinated exorcism.
But all these set-up elements are scrapped the moment the pool ghosts really get going. None of the little background character nuance bits play any part in the main plot, which makes it feel like wasted airtime. None of the relationships really seem to matter. Most annoyingly, when Condon’s Eve starts to figure out that her husband might have a weird attachment to their pool, her response is…the same vague frowny face she had when the cat goes missing. It’s a squandered opportunity to make a character-based domestic horror with good actors.
If you’re bored in January and want to see a movie, good news! American Fiction, Poor Things, and All of Us Strangers are all at local cineplexes. As for Night Swim, wait for streaming so you can scroll your phone while the movie treads water to pad its running time.
Verdict: A January horror movie that is promising enough to be disappointing. Skip it.
Night Swim is rated PG-13 and is available in theaters January 5.
