Night Swim (2024)
SHOULD I SEE IT?
YES
Blumhouse movies have a built in audience and Night Swim is their first release, and the first wide release movie of 2024.
When you have a talented, Oscar-nominated actor like Kerry Condon in a movie like this, it definitely perks one’s interest.
Adapted from a fun, four-minute short film, Night Swim arrives with some palpable buzz around how intense and scary this might be.
NO
Except it isn’t scary at all. Does a jump scare count as a jump scare if you don’t jump and/or are not scared?
Condon tries to keep this thing afloat, but the movie only becomes more nonsensical and silly the longer it goes.
There’s just not enough of anything to make this entertaining. Not enough humor. Certainly not enough suspense or intensity. Not enough originality around a rather clever concept. Not enough good performances to support Condon’s heavy lifting.
OUR REVIEW
One year ago, the 2023 movie year began with a gem of a surprise in M3GAN, a horror film about an artificially intelligent doll who becomes self-aware and deeply protective of its human companion. Funny, clever, unpredictable, and with an instantly iconic main character, M3GAN felt like maybe it would reverse the trend of studios treating January as a cinematic junkyard to dump terrible movies studios simply did not know what to do with.
Well, it was fun while it lasted.
M3GAN Producers Jason Blum and James Wan return one year later with Night Swim, a horror flick about malevolent happenings in a family’s backyard pool. Director Bryce McGuire adapts his nearly four-minute short film from 2014 to feature-length status and honestly…he shouldn’t have. Night Swim works fine as a four-minute suspense-riddled jolt to the senses. At nearly 100 minutes, the premise either runs dry and is too waterlogged to deal with. Honestly, I dunno - just pick whatever analogy seems to fit for you.
In the 2014 short, a teenage girl is having an evening swim when she thinks she sees someone who may or may not actually be there. In this version, we expand that idea and meet the Waller family. When we see them, they are looking at townhomes, but husband Ray (Wyatt Russell) is dissatisfied with the location, look, and feel of the community, Ray convinces wife Eve (Kerry Condon) and their two children, Izzy and Elliot (Amélie Hoeferle, Gavin Warren), to move into a massive neighborhood home, with a gigantic, albeit neglected pool tarped over in the backyard.
Ray, a former Major League Baseball star, has just been diagnosed with early stages of multiple sclerosis and he is not adjusting well to the struggle and strain the disease is placing on his body. Eve, meanwhile, has taken a job at Elliot’s school and Izzy is interested in a boy on the Christian swim team at her new high school (why that’s a thing is never explained). Once they are all moved in, they love having the pool. And Ray especially is very excited at the prospects of improving his physical condition with water therapy and other pool-related exercises.
Because this is a horror movie, nothing is as it seems. Early on, we are shown a prologue, documenting events from thirty years prior which receive larger context later in the film. In present day, as Eve and the kids begin seeing and experiencing strange happenings above and below the water, Ray becomes even more drawn to the pool and begins feeling remarkably better.
Unfortunately, McGuire runs out of ideas rather quickly. As a result, Night Swim has nowhere to go once we establish that the pool may in fact be haunted. If we are not watching contrived scenes built around people swimming in a pool, or thinking about swimming in a pool, then we are watching scenes where characters invent ways to get into the pool. When Ray is asked to help assist as a hitting coach for Elliot’s baseball team, and Eve discusses never establishing meaningful friendships for very long because of Ray’s history in the big leagues, it becomes hard not to laugh out loud when Ray proposes the Wallers host a “pool party” for the entire neighborhood and Elliot’s baseball team.
This is the logic within Night Swim: time and time again we find some way to just make people jump into that damn pool.
Never scary, Night Swim just barely floats along. Condon tries to sell the increasingly ludicrous story effectively, and has moments where she almost pulls it off. Hoeferle and Warren are good, effective horror movie kids, while a comedic performance by Nancy Lenehan, as an aloof, disingenuous real estate agent had me laughing heartily in the opening minutes. But soon, we are left with a movie trying to jump out of the bushes and scare you, or, perhaps, emerge from the depths to grab you. Countless scenes find the camera diving into the water alongside our characters; so often in fact that the tactic verges on parody.
Russell (Overlord, “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier”) is something of a mess here, finding no sense of nuance in any facet of his character. The kitschy and campy performance he gives is hard not to laugh at. His performance is so off-putting, I started envisioning what the movie could look like without his character even being in it. I don’t honestly think we need Ray in the film to accomplish what McGuire is hoping to achieve.
But honestly, to unpack any of that is to give this movie too much more of my time.
On the bright side, this is the first week in January and we have 51 more weeks of movies to go in 2024. Night Swim is ultimately a dim-witted, silly film adaptation of a four-minute short film that accomplishes everything this movie fails to achieve with 94 additional minutes.
CAST & CREW
Starring: Wyatt Russell, Kerry Condon, Amélie Hoeferle, Gavin Warren, Jodi Long, Nancy Lenehan, Eddie Martinez, Elijah Roberts, Rahnuma Panthaky, Ayazhan Dalabayeva, Ben Sinclair, Ellie Araiza, Joziah Lagonoy, Aivan Alexander Uttapa
Director: Bryce McGuire
Written by: Bryce McGuire (screenplay); Bryce McGuire, Rod Blackhurst (screen story)
Based on the short film “Night Swim” written by Bryce McGuire and Rod Blackhurst
Release Date: January 5, 2024
Universal Pictures