A slight and silly PG-13 horror film with a hefty pedigree (at least as far as producers go—James Wan and Jason Blum), Night Swim centers on the Waller family, with father Ray Waller (Wyatt Russell) as a recuperating major league baseball player who is staring a change of living squarely in the face as his medical condition seems to be worsening. With his wife Eve (Kerry Condon), elder daughter Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle), and son Elliot (Gavin Warren), he purchases a new home, and Ray seems especially drawn to the backyard pool that actually draws its water supply from the spring below the property.
Night Swim has its roots in a five-minute 2014 short film (of the same name) that writer/director Bryce McGuire co-wrote with Rod Blackhurst, and while the well water seems to actually be healing Ray from what might be early onset MS, he is obsessed with being in the pool as often as he can. Meanwhile, every other member of his family has horrible encounters in and around the pool that all seem to involve seeing things below the surface and sometimes even being pulled into the depths of the pool by these same forces. We’re given clues as to what these forces might be, including an opening sequence in which a girl named Rebecca (Ayazhan Dalabayeva) is pulled into the water when she and her family lived in the same house—an incident that Eve finds out about and is determined to investigate, which is bound to lead to only wonderful consequences.
Night Swim isn’t especially scary, even with watery ghosts popping out of every drain imaginable, and the vague mythology of the haunted pool is perhaps too vague to be particularly effective as a true horror story. The perilous nature of the household pool, in general, is actually captured perfectly and made me far more tense than the various dark figures that lurk in the water. Still, the fact that Ray seems to get sick every time he attempts to leave the clutches of the pool didn’t really make sense in the context of this piece.
Strong performances from Russell and Condon help keep us mildly interested in the stakes of this place and the family’s future, but the screenplay is shallower than a baby pool. Even the aesthetics outside of the pool sequences are fairly uninspired, all of which leaves the actors in a lurch. Not surprisingly, the film’s climactic battle between Ray and whatever lives in his pool is confusing, pointless, and underwhelming. And like any Blumhouse production worth its salt, while it seems like this pool is no longer a threat to this particular family, whoever moves into the house next is in for a whopper of a chlorine bill.
There are some blurry messages in Night Swim about the perils of wanting something too much (in this case, Ray wants his baseball career not just to return but to thrive in ways it likely never did previously) and the price that must be paid for such extravagant dreams, but they get lost by the bloated climax that cares more about cheap scares and murky depths. The film is so ineffectual, it might even make you less scared of taking a dip in the dark. It was almost exactly a year ago when Blumhouse shocked the hell out of most of the horror community (and beyond) with M3gan, and I’m here to tell you Night Swim in no way satisfies the smart/stupid lessons of its predecessor.
The film is now in theaters.
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