January is here. That’s the time when studios will traditionally and unceremoniously dump movies in which they don’t have a lot of confidence. That usually includes a lot of horror movies. But last year, January gave us such well-received offerings as M3GAN, Knock at the Cabin, and Skinamarink. So, what does this January have in store for us? We shall see. First up – the new Blumhouse Studios movie Night Swim.
Night Swim is about a former baseball player named Ray Waller (Overlord’s Wyatt Russell) who is suffering from Multiple Sclerosis. Along with his wife Eve (Kerry Condon from The Banshees of Inisherin) and kids Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle from The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes) and Elliot (Fear the Walking Dead’s Gavin Warren), he seems to find a perfect house in which to lay low and begin his recuperation – it even has a pool so that he can do his water therapy. Soon after moving in, the family starts to experience strange happenings, all revolving around the aforementioned pool.
Forget about haunted houses, haunted forests, and even haunted cars. Night Swim is about a haunted pool. Writer/director Bryce McGuire and co-writer Rod Blackhurst adapted the screenplay from their own spooky 2014 short film of the same name. In reality, it’s not so much of an adaptation as it is an expansion. It provides a mythology to the one-scene short film. Whether or not that mythology is necessary is the question.
The set-up and first act of Night Swim are terrific. The audience cares about the characters and is engaged in what is happening to them. And for the most part, it’s a fairly creative little supernatural tale. For as corny as a movie about a haunted pool sounds, Night Swim pulls it off. At least, for a while it does. Once the movie gets rolling and the family (and the audience) starts to figure out what’s going on, it loses most of the momentum that it has been building up for the first half.
Unsurprisingly, Night Swim is an aesthetically well-made movie. There’s some great underwater camera work from cinematographer Charlie Sarroff (Smile, Relic), a nail-biting score from composer Mark Korven (The Witch, The Black Phone), and a subtle sound design by P.K. Hooker (Five Nights at Freddy’s, Insidious: The Red Door) and his team, all of which helps to build tension in the way that only a Blumhouse production can do it. The suspense doesn’t always pay off with a good scare, but boy does it build itself up well.
Story-wise, Night Swim is full of problems. There are plenty of unexplored subplots, untied loose ends, and unforgivable plot holes that leave the audience scratching its head. It feels as if either the concept of the short film wasn’t ambitious enough to support a feature on its own, or that the feature is too ambitious to do justice to the simple-yet-terrifying short film. Either way, Night Swim is let down by its story. Even by horror movie standards, the decisions made and the events that occur are, in a word, silly.
Night Swim is the epitome of a January release. It’s serviceable in the moment, but it will be forgotten by summer. And it may be better that way.
GRADE: C
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for language, terror, and some violent content
Running Time: 1 hour 38 minutes
Release Date: January 5, 2024
Studio: Universal Pictures
