Shallow, Campy ‘NIGHT SWIM’ Mostly Treads Water

A former Major League Baseball player moves his family to a house with a haunted pool in the campy Jan-horror release, Night Swim. Six months after receiving a career-ending MS diagnosis, Ray Waller (Wyatt Russell), his wife Eve (Kerry Condon), and their two high school aged children, Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle) and Elliot (Gavin Warren), struggle to accept the reality that life as they once knew it is over. Put off by the idea of moving to an assisted living community, Waller finds himself drawn to a house with a shady past (an instance of its evil detailed in the mildly effective cold open) and a mysterious pool. He soon discovers that its waters, drawn from a nearby natural spring, have healing qualities. But not all who wade into its wet quarters fare so well.

Night Swim, the debut feature film from Bryce McGuire, is an expansion of the low-budget, five-minute 2014 viral short of the same name and underscores the reality that not all low-budget, five-minute viral shorts require a feature-length adaptation. And while it isn’t as bad as its silly premise and January release suggest, it’s still a mostly forgettable dip into the shallower end of the horror pool. But not bad and actually worthwhile are not synonymous and although there’s enjoyable splashes of waterlogged camp to be found alongside the better-than-necessary performances from Russell and Condon, Night Swim just kinda floats along without ever dragging audiences under or fully inviting them to the pool party. Being a Blumhouse production, Night Swim looks pretty sharp and, coupled with the aforementioned Russell/Condon combo sharing the bulk of the narrative heavy-lifting, it’s punching above its weight class in more lanes than one. Both of the veteran dramatic performers put in solid-to-good performances, even when the script asks them to deliver clunky lines about cursed water or something. Neither break out into wowing territory – end of year lists, they will not float onto – but nor do they sink to the movie’s lesser impulses, which could have been tempting, easy in the less capable hands of less respected talent.

While the script, also from McGuire, does a decent job of establishing the family dynamic and teasing out the chemistry between the Waller clan, there just isn’t a lot of specificity there and that hurts the film down the stretch. Elliot is meant to be a bit of a wimpish, loner type with a strained relationship with his alpha male, athlete father but that element never really connects or crystalizes, which exacerbates a lack of should-be tension between them later in the film. This becomes an issue in the final stretch of the film when one character makes a sacrifice that fails to connect emotionally in order to tie everything together thematically.

So too is teenage daughter Izzy a bit of a waif-like cardboard cutout character without real personality or motivations to speak of, though she has a nasty streak (at one point she threatens to Tide-Pod her younger brother’s fish tank if he spills the beans that she had a boy over) but that side of her never really shows up again. Pity. Even while Condon offers impressive work, she’s mostly relegated to the role of supporting wife and good mom, which is a bummer. Russell’s Waller is the most fleshed out of the crew, a man haunted by the evils lurking in his pool and the legacy stolen from him by his diagnosis. His transformation from Good Dad to Swim Team Jack Torrence doesn’t really work but it’s a nod towards something at least. Despite these flaws, the actors sell their parts and make us not want them to drown, which is all anyone looking for a cheap January thrill should really be requiring.
Cinematographer Charlie Sarroff manages to find a couple interesting ways to frame and light the many underwater swimming scenes, distracting when he can from the fact that large corners of the film were shot in some bland studio dunk-tank. There’s fleeting moments of water-bound tension drowned out by screwy attempts to frighten (the jump scares just aren’t there) and undercooked mythology. When McGuire attempts straight horror, he mostly comes up dry. There’s nothing really frightening here, though when the camp delivers, the flick transforms into an undeniably good time with its share of laughs. Even for a movie about an evil pool, Night Swim is pretty silly, but mostly fun, takes-itself-just-seriously-enough way. If only it leaned into the absurdity more, we might have something more closely resembling Sam Raimi.

There’s an undercurrent of a twisted underwater fantasy but it isn’t given enough room to breathe. Instead, it’s used to prop up some jump-scare spooks and then quietly retreats. The wet gothic mythology of Night Swim is just largely flat and fails to answer some of its most basic questions, including but not limited to: What happened to McGuire in a pool? What does water even want? Why do scientists call it “H2O” and should that be a red flag? Who are all the other spirits in and around the pool and why are some bloated AF while others are freshly dunked? Why did that one guy put so much ketchup on his hot dog? Mysteries all, left like a message in a bottle, to haunt January cineplex goers who want for mild entertainment. Frankly, they could certainly do worse.

CONCLUSION: Though Bryce McGuire’s horror debut sinks a bit more than it swims, strong performances from Wyatt Russell and Kerry Condon almost keep this domestic haunted pool movie afloat. ‘Night Swim’ champions genre campiness over genuine scares but doesn’t contain enough of either.