“Night Swim” invites audiences to follow a suburban family who discovers their backyard pool is haunted into the deep end. While the story sounds scary, it hardly makes a splash.
Part of what makes Blumhouse films so appealing is that they can deliver quality horror flicks using a low-production budget. These films can be made on the fly, and they could make their money back and profit. So, it’s no wonder they and James Wan’s Atomic Monster set their eyes on the acclaimed 2014 short film “Night Swim.” It’s a collaboration that gave us films like “M3GAN.” And it has everything you could want from such a partnership from masters of horror. There’s a horrifying story and a cast fully invested in the project that seems limited because of where it is set. While director Bryce McGuire tries to expand on his short by surrounding its characters with a tragic story and exciting mythology, it never reaches its full potential regarding the scares.
“Night Swim” follows Ray Waller (Wyatt Russell), a former major league baseball player forced into early retirement by multiple sclerosis, who is looking for a new house with his concerned wife Eve (Kerry Condon), teenage daughter Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle) and young son Elliot (Gavin Warren). Tired of constantly moving because of trades, Eve wants to set roots by purchasing a place they can call home. After some house hunting, Ray discovers a home with a backyard swimming pool. It could be fun for the kids while also helping with his therapy. What they don’t know is that the pool has a haunted history – something which is detailed in the film’s cold opening, where a little girl who wanted to retrieve a toy boat for her sick young brother is taken into the water by an unseen evil force and never seen again.
Though the dilapidated pool desperately needs maintenance, the Wallers are determined to restore it to its former glory. But the family ignores the early warning signs of the malevolent presence, even after Ray gets a bloody gash or the drainage system spits up dirty water. Once the pool is cleaned and filled, the family members spend their time in the pool individually and have different experiences. For Ray, the pool has regenerative effects. Every time he swims in the pool, he comes out stronger. And that shows during one of his son’s baseball practices, where he smashes a baseball out of the park and shatters a field light.
However, the same cannot be said for the rest of the Wallers. The remaining three all have near-drowning experiences and see a blurred malevolent force that tries to drag them into the dark depths. For Elliot, playing a family-friendly game of picking up coins from the bottom of the pool turns deadly. Izzy playing a game of Marco Polo with her boyfriend goes differently than planned. And Eve starts to see things that aren’t there. The three try to explain what is happening to Ray, but by then, it is too late because the pool has already claimed his soul. Soon, we learn about the pool’s history and the malignant fate that awaits those who swim in it.
Part of what makes something like “Night Swim” work is that it is committed to making you believe that something as harmless as a backyard swimming pool can be evil. As such, writer and director Bryce McGuire expands upon his short by giving the pool a frightening mythology, writes the rules about what happens if you spend time in it, giving us characters the audience should care about, and then scaring everyone while leaving the Wallers to figure out how to defeat this evil force.
The heart of “Night Swim’s” scares comes from the disorienting underwater camera work. From the outside, Charlie Sarroff’s cinematography creates a happy and safe environment. No one would ever suspect it is a tiny, malevolent body of water. Then, going in, one can’t see because the water blurs the vision and the sense of claustrophobia because one is surrounded by nothing but water. While those scenes are enough to generate a few scares – the Marco Polo scene was terrifying – anything outside doesn’t make that much of a splash and lands with a thud.
McGuire gives us plenty of reasons why we should care about the Wallers and for them to keep the possessed pool despite the unexplained voices and visions they’ve been having or Ray’s odd changed behavior. Perhaps he does too good of a job with it because those moments outside of the pool where we get to see Ray’s newfound health or the rest of the family connecting with the community end up treading water, desperately trying to stay afloat and not drown until the next tenuous moment or jump scare. With its short 98-minute runtime, “Night Swim” needs to establish what makes the pool so frightening, the pool rules, introduce the family, slowly unravel its mythology, and still be entertaining. And yet, because it has to do so much in so little time, many scares don’t hit as hard as they should because the film was so busy trying to build up to the more significant twist while juggling the family drama.
To lighten the mood, the script has a self-awareness of the absurdity that the pool is magical. Though doctors are mystified at how Ray’s health could improve so quickly, he explains with a straight face that it is all because of the pool. Even the doctors just accept his explanation without question. And the meta-humor is good enough for a few chuckles; the film has to take another lap around the aspects that make the film less enjoyable.
It’s not as though “Night Swim” isn’t a horror film you shouldn’t jump into. Blumhouse knows how to capitalize on a low budget with a high concept. The latter is undoubtedly there, especially when the characters enter the water. It’s the stuff that happens on land that’s boring.
6/10
In theaters January 5, 2024.
