A haunted pool, you say? Why, if a pool were haunted, any number of horrible things could occur! With a non-haunted pool, risk can be mitigated by parental supervision and a few weeks of swimming lessons. But a haunted pool means that all bets are off. Try to call out to a lifeguard when there’s a creature tugging at your feet. Try to swim to the surface when you can no longer tell where the surface is! Scary, right? I, for one, am not getting into a haunted pool even for a second. I won’t even go in the ocean (all oceans are actually haunted).
But here’s the thing: in the case of Night Swim, the haunted pool is not scary at all. Instead, it’s mostly pretty silly. Yes, scary seeming things do happen, but almost all of them evoke laughter more than genuine fright. A shame too, considering that the characters are written uncommonly well for a January horror movie. But alas, it is January, and Night Swim is indeed a horror movie, so we’ll all just have to tread water for a bit and see what shakes out.
Based on the 2014 short film of the same name, Night Swim is the latest spooker that aims to milk a feature length fright flick out of a thin, albeit novel concept. Generally speaking, you love to see it. The beauty of horror is that budgets can remain relatively low, offering more opportunities for filmmakers to see their ideas at the multiplex. It’s always a good thing, even if the resulting products don’t always have the juice to sustain a full 90-plus minutes. In the case of Night Swim, the growing pains are apparent at every turn, resulting in a brothy soup of clever ideas that just don’t come together into a satisfying whole.
The story follows Ray and Eve Waller (Wyatt Russell & Kerry Condon) and their children Izzy and Elliot as they move to the suburbs for a change of pace. Ray is a former professional baseball player who has recently put his career aside in the face of a multiple sclerosis diagnosis. He doesn’t want a house that feels like a hospital, so he refuses the tricked-out home designed for people in his situation, instead picking the house that has a spring-fed in-ground swimming pool (I had no idea these were even a thing). But there’s a catch: the pool is haunted! You knew this!
The ins and outs of the haunting are all over the place. The pool exhibits healing properties for Ray (with a side of Amityville-esque possession), but for everyone else it’s a nightmare: visions of dead people, an ever-shifting underwater geography, and a damned flickering light. You simply cannot swim without the pool light flickering a few times! There are no “rules” that dictate what the pool can and can’t do, and even when the admittedly clever mythology behind the pool is revealed, its methods become no more apparent. Basically, the pool has the ability to do horror movie shit, which is exactly what it does. Multiple times throughout the movie the crowd I saw it with laughed at the ways that each member of the Waller family is drawn to swimming:
“You know what’s good for MS? Swimming!
“Welcome to your first day of high school! Care to join the swim team?”
It’s very funny.
Leaps in logic must be made. These include, but aren’t limited to: the complete absence of a pre-purchase inspection of the home; the fact that a young girl is said to have drowned in the pool back in the day despite the fact that the pool explicitly makes her disappear into thin air, leaving no corpse; and the idea that a small community would have absolutely no recollection of a little girl’s death, and are more than happy to attend a pool party in the offending pool that any small town would be extremely wary of.
Yet despite all of the ridiculousness and the near complete lack of effective scare sequences, Night Swim isn’t entirely dead in the water. While the peril lacks punch, the characters are all written notably well, tapping into a real-world family dynamic that, in a scarier movie, could have really sung. This is due to strong character work in the script as well as the aforementioned performances. Condon, who just a year ago was up for an Oscar, elevates every scene she’s in. I honestly didn’t recognize her on account of how believable her American accent is. Russell is a charmer who makes for a genuine dad. He makes us really care about his condition and his family. The (non-supernatural) tensions that brew between them have a level of verisimilitude that is rare in studio horror. The human elements of Night Swim are all on point. It’s just that when the ghosties show up, it goes off the deep end.
These pool puns doing anything for ya? No? Ok, I’ll do a lap.
Directed by Bryce McGuire
Written by Bruce McGuire, Rod Blackhurst
Starring Wyatt Russell, Kerry Condon, Amélie Hoeferle, Gavin Warren
Rated PG-13, 98 minutes