Night Swim – Review
98 Minutes, Rated PG-13
Written and Directed by Bryce McGuire
**NOTE: this post may be updated with audio once we actually have the chance to talk about it. Until then, you can read Mark’s review below. Remember, though, you can listen to all our discussions of this and every other movie directly over on ACAST. Stay tuned.**
Synopsis:
Ray Waller, a former major league baseball player forced into early retirement by a degenerative illness, moves into a new home with his wife Eve, teenage daughter Izzy, and young son Elliot. Secretly hoping, against the odds, to return to pro ball, Ray persuades Eve that the new home’s shimmering backyard swimming pool will be fun for the kids and provide physical therapy for him. But a dark secret in the home’s past will unleash a malevolent force that will drag the family under, into the depths of inescapable terror.
Based on the acclaimed 2014 short film by Rod Blackhurst and Bryce McGuire, Night Swim is another entry by Blumhouse into the genre of “small budget, big return” horror that they’ve been so successful at, over the years.
And I’ve been a fan of most of them. I like Night Swim, too, of course, but it’s not really as good as any of the previous Blumhouse and Blumhouse-adjacent films. This one has a solid premise (once we get around to learning — aka: being directly told — what that is) and suitably creepy PG-13 suspense and anxiety-inducing scenes, but even for films like these, the characters themselves feel a bit flat, floating (if you’ll pardon the analogy) on the surface of the story without us really getting to know any of them except for Ray.
His wife? There’s something there between them and the more-than-recent past.
His daughter? A placeholding teen, although one without the usual hate-my-parents attitude.
The son? So much we don’t understand about him that we should in order to understand WHY what happens to him happens to him specifically.
But Ray? We get Ray. It’s not hard to understand someone who lost something, had it taken from them, who desperately wants it back and will do a lot to get it. It’s easy to lose oneself in the desire to recapture what is gone, and that instinct is easily exploitable in films like this by malevolent forces.
Before you know it, you no longer care how far you have to go.
The idea of healing waters exists in almost every culture going back millenia, and the idea seems ripe for exploitation in a film such as this, and this one comes near to it, but never quite gets there the way it should to fully exploit the premise.
That doesn’t mean the film is terrible (although some of my fellow SLC-area critics didn’t care for it at all), but as my wife put it: “M3gan and The Nun were scarier.” She’s not wrong.
If you’re a Blumhouse fan, you’ll probably enjoy this one, if not… this one probably won’t convert you to their cause.
Night Swim is now in theaters and stars Wyatt Russell, Kerry Condon, Amelie Hoeferle, Gavin Warren, Elijah J. Roberts, and Ayazhan Dalabayeva.
And remember, if the BEST thing you can say about a movie is that it’s “visually stunning,” then they’ve done something wrong.
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