Review: Night Swim (2024)

 Night Swim (2024)

Rated PG-13 for terror, some violent content and language

Score: 2 out of 5

Night Swim is the quintessential "fuck you, it's January" movie. Hollywood loves to ring in the new year by dumping into theaters the garbage they had no faith in at any other time of the year, because January is when kids are in school, theaters in half the country can get shut down by blizzards, there aren't many holidays offering extended three-week weekends (save for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which isn't universally celebrated as a day off), and prestige films given limited release in the fall are expanding their theatrical runs in anticipation of the Oscars. And lately, a tradition has been to give the first weekend of the new year over to a low-budget horror movie. While Blumhouse struck rare gold last year with M3GAN, a sci-fi horror film that actually turned out to be far better than its release date suggested it would be, this year January returned to form with Night Swim, a ho-hum ghost story adapted from a 2014 short film where the worst thing about it is that it's not completely wretched. There were seeds of a good movie buried in here, with all-around solid acting and production values, some effective sequences, some cool cinematography, and a nifty central conceit behind its evil pool, and there was a brief moment when it finally started to get good. Unfortunately, as with many movies that were adapted from short films, there's not enough to carry it, resting on the most generic haunted house story possible (but with a haunted pool this time!) to stretch a four-minute short to feature length. It's not the worst January horror film ever made, or even in the Bottom Three (I assure you, the competition is stiff), but it's otherwise completely generic, disposable, and at times unintentionally funny #content that would've been thrown into the wasteland of the direct-to-VOD/streaming market if not for January.

Stop me if you've heard this one: a family called the Wallers, comprised of the father Ray, the mother Eve, the teenage daughter Izzy, and the adolescent son Elliot, has moved into a big, luxurious house whose price is too good to be true, only for them to soon learn why it was so cheap. Namely, it's haunted. Or rather, the swimming pool is. And much like every poor sucker who's ever lived in the Amityville house, the mother Eve and the kids Izzy and Elliot start experiencing supernatural forces when they come in contact with the pool, while the father Ray, a former Milwaukee Brewers player whose baseball career was tragically cut short by multiple sclerosis, sees his illness miraculously cured and starts behaving in increasingly erratic fashion.

If you've ever seen a movie about a family stuck in a haunted house, you've seen this movie. Virtually every plot beat was visible from a mile away, from each family member having their own encounter with the supernatural to the mother doing research on the pool's dark history to somebody getting possessed by the spirit causing all of this. There are random plot threads about the Wallers' neighbors perhaps knowing more about what's happening than they let on, and Izzy's hunky swimmer love interest Ronin being a devout Christian, but the film does nothing with them. Every single plot point here is standard haunted house movie boilerplate, like writer/director Bryce McGuire had a cool idea for a cool scene that he turned into a cool short but never thought about how to turn it into a 90-minute movie until Jason Blum and James Wan decided to give him a lot of money to do just that. The worst part is, once we find out what's actually going on with the haunted pool, a glimpse at a far more interesting movie is had, one focused on Ray as he grapples with how his illness destroyed his life and how whatever's in the pool seems to have given him a second chance -- but one that comes at a terrible cost. As it stood, however, while Wyatt Russell played his stock Horror Dad character well, he never had much of a chance to do anything more beyond play a stock Horror Dad, nor did anybody else in the cast have the opportunity to play more than the stock Horror Mom, Horror Teen, and Horror Kid. The film wanted me to care about the Wallers as a family, but they were such a thinly-written family that, even when they were in peril, the Eight Deadly Words were ringing in my head: I don't care what happens to these people.

(I will, however, give the film points for having a sense of humor enough to have Izzy's high school be named after Harold Holt, an Australian Prime Minister who infamously disappeared when he went out for a swim on the beach.)

The scares, too, don't really do much to excel. Using a swimming pool as a setting gave some fun opportunities for cool aquatic cinematography that the film readily took advantage of, meaning that, at the very least, this was a pretty nice-looking film. Any sense of originality stopped there, however, as what followed were all the scares you've seen in a dozen other haunted house movies: jump scares ahoy, characters seeing things that aren't there, you name it, all of it done in ways that have been done better before. Characters make stupid decisions constantly, especially the young son Elliot, and while I could at first justify it by saying that at least it was a dumb kid acting stupid around the pool, by the end he really should've known better than to even think about doing what he did. The teenage daughter Izzy had no real purpose beyond recreating the scene from the short film, because that featured a young woman who looked good in a bikini, which meant the movie had to have someone who fit that description. The design of the ghost is a bloated, half-rotted corpse that probably sounded good on paper, but its execution in the movie is almost laughable, leaving a lot to be desired and not coming across as scary in the slightest.

The Bottom Line

Night Swim isn't a movie I'd personally push into the pool, but if somebody did, I'd probably have a good laugh at its expense. It's competent, but beyond the idea of a haunted pool, everything about it is the sort of thing that's been done better before, and worst of all, I can easily see how a better movie could've been made out of the same material. I wouldn't even bother waiting for Netflix.