Night Swim, 2023.
Directed by Bryce McGuire.
Starring Wyatt Russell, Kerry Condon, Amélie Hoeferle, Gavin Warren, Nancy Lenehan, Jodi Long, Preston Galli, and Aivan Uttapa.
SYNOPSIS:
Forced into early retirement by a degenerative illness, former baseball player Ray Waller moves into a new house with his wife and two children. He hopes that the backyard swimming pool will be fun for the kids and provide physical therapy for himself. However, a dark secret from the home’s past soon unleashes a malevolent force that drags the family into the depths of inescapable terror.
It’s not a good sign when the details of a lead’s retired Major League Baseball career are more entertaining to learn about than a magical swimming pool that also swallows people into the abyss in return for healing physical pain, but that’s co-writer/director Bryce McGuire’s Night Swim (collaborating on the screen story with Rod Blackhurst), a film that commits pretty much every cardinal sin of PG-13 horror moviemaking and fleshing out one’s short into feature-length running time.
Wyatt Russell’s Ray Waller has given up his big-league baseball career due to a degenerative leg injury. There are glimpses of him playing for the Milwaukee Brewers, although it is also made clear that these unfortunate circumstances have left him frequently on the trading block, meaning he is often forced to relocate with his family. That would be his loving wife Eve (Kerry Condon), who works as a school admin near their newest home (a convenience that allows for the trope of researching through databases for details related to the hauntings), and children Elliott and Izzy (played by Gavin Warren and Amélie Hoeferle), each of whom struggles to start over in their own ways and have picked up extracurricular activities (baseball and swimming.)
This new home is chosen since Ray has always wanted a backyard swimming pool, but also because his doctors suggest the activity as a way to release tension in his leg. What the family finds out fairly quickly is that spooky occurrences are inseparable from the swimming pool, particularly at night, yet they keep repairing and going inside anyway, quick to believe absurd rationalizations that they just fell in the pool or got tangled up in something when it’s clear as day that something supernatural is present. As a result, there is practically no reason to care about any of these characters, even when the third act suddenly decides this is a movie about what it means to sacrifice something for a loved one.
Naturally, this would be forgivable if Night Swim succeeded at being scary. However, aside from one decent visual of flickering lights (especially when captured from an aerial perspective) and the promise for potential with a game of Marco Polo, the horror is nothing but bog-standard demonic nonsense filtered into the arena of a swimming pool. Generic-looking demons creep out at night underwater, characters and pets vanish into nothingness, and the evil water travels inside characters for some standard possession sequences. Perhaps more disappointing is that the filmmakers don’t even see the potential in how any of this could be comedic or fun. It’s played straight with no thrills.
There is nothing deeply offensive about the performances or craftsmanship, but there isn’t a single scary segment here. By the time the ending rolls around, there is just a flabbergasted feeling of wondering why someone didn’t do what happens years ago. There is also a tacked-on prologue taking place in 1992 that comes back into the present day, amounting to nothing beyond a vague explanation of the reach of this demonic water.
Taking a guess, the concept likely works better in the form of a short. Stretching Night Swim out into a 90-minute feature only does a disservice to the idea, straining everything about this concept, from scare factor to logic.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★
Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd, or email me at MetalGearSolid719@gmail.com
