Night Swim (2024)

Score: 1.5 / 5

What an unfortunate start to 2024. January, jokingly known as the graveyard or dump of horror films, gets a bad rap because of films like this, coming on the tails of awards season and reminding people why sometimes it's better to stay at home in the winter. And this particular title -- one that frankly seemed out of place in this snowy season but suggested intriguing originality -- heralded the first theatrical release of the newly merged horror superstudios (Jason Blum's) Blumhouse and (James Wan's) Atomic Monster. We all deserved better.

You go into a film like this expecting shlock, at least to some extent. An inanimate object or place that eats people? It's B-movie material at best, either in the form of a murderous doll or carnivorous car or a sentient hungry house, and that's partly what makes it fun. What clever kills can we expect? What harebrained nonsense can the writers string together to make a mildly compelling plot? After all, if it's an inanimate object, you can always get rid of it, right? If it's a location, you can just leave. Sometimes these films will surprise us with arthouse ventures like In Fabric, and reach for more lofty, heady ideas layered in symbolism and parable. But those are rare exceptions. Evidently.

Night Swim is indeed a horror film about a haunted suburban pool. SPOILER ALERT (not that it matters, really) because this paragraph will briefly summarize the plot. A typical Americana family moves into a house that features a backyard pool that is, notably, spring fed; it seems ideal for them, as the father recently had to retire from baseball due to illness. Using the pool for his physical therapy, the father grows healthier, but his cat and children are attacked by something in the pool, not to mention the ghostly apparitions that stalk the family by day and night. They eventually learn the spring was originally a healing spring that required sacrifices, and this time, to satisfy the father's wish for healing, it attempts to claim the life of one of his children.

That's about it for plot, as well as character, which leaves a lot of time and energy for... what, exactly? Certainly not character, and the reasonably likable actors all seem disheartened to be in such a mess of a movie. Presumably atmosphere, effects, and thrills are the focus, then. Spectacle is the name of the game in flicks like this, and actually I didn't hate everything the filmmakers brought to the table in this regard. Charlie Sarroff's cinematography is sometimes really wonderful here, finding visually entrancing moments of terror in a pristine backyard lit from below by a cool blue light only to have the light flicker out. Annoying as they can be, shots from the camera bobbing in and out of the pool at water level -- accompanied by solid sound mixing -- serve to concurrently immerse the viewer and bewilder the viewer; anyone who has ever swum knows that particularly vulnerable position of not being able to see both under and above water while you're in it.

Truth be told, the concept of a natural wishing well is pretty cool, and I would have liked the film to lean into that mystique more. Not in the Stephen King Pet Sematary way of making it an old Native American burial ground, although multiple times during this screening my friend and I wondered aloud if it would go in that direction, a la Poltergeist. Not even really in a "Monkey's Paw" manner. But, in retrospect, there was room for a lot of fascinating ideas around water, baptism, rebirth, therapy, and submersion that could have come into play. Hell, even M. Night Shyamalan's popularly unpopular Lady in the Water (which should be critically reappraised because it's a beautiful dark fantasy years ahead of its time) had more tricks up its sleeve regarding the nature and magic of a swimming pool. 

Instead, we got a film in which the water does nothing except occasionally "swallow" people into a void that visually rips off the "sunken place" in Get Out, slow motion and bright floating rectangle included. That's it for water features. Everything else is blurry bluish ghosts prowling around the pool and house, looking like waterlogged ghosts of J-horror fame as they'd appear in a Pirates of the Caribbean knockoff. The jump scares are mostly predictable and ineffective, though a few potentially fearsome moments had me bracing for the worst, which never really came. Writer and director Bryce McGuire, in his directorial debut, tries to follow formula at every turn, hamstringing his own efforts at realizing what could have been a cool idea of ancient evil, water's revenge, the insatiable nature of, well, nature against modern man.

Alternatively, this could have been equally satisfying if the pool remained a malevolent mystery. What if a suburban pool just ate people? No ghosts, no magic, no wishes. Just occasionally vanished someone from the midst of a pool party. Maybe you'd find a few teeth or jewelry or bone shards in the gurgling filter now and again. I'd have watched that, too. Anything other than what we got.