Movie Review: ‘Night Swim’
Director: Bryce McGuire
Cast: Wyatt Russell, Kerry Condon, Amélie Hoeferle, Gavin Warren, Jodi Long, Nancy Lenehan
Plot: A former baseball star who is managing a debilitating illness move into a new house with his young family. They soon discover that their beloved new swimming pool is a haunted wishing well.
Review: So…the haunted swimming pool movie. We went into this one with an open mind because the horror genre has a pretty extensive history of making really great and terrifying movies about of premises that sound ridiculous. A haunted video tape that kills everyone who watches it became the trendsetting The Ring. An insane and sentient car tyre roaming the desert and making people’s heads explore is the cult classic Rubber. A scary man who kills you in your dreams spawned the massive A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. Even a haunted sexually transmitted infection became the modern hit It Follows. Who knows what this haunted swimming pool movie is going to really give us?
As it turns out, Night Swim is just as silly as the premise suggests. It’s a movie that slowly ticks off the horror movie tropes in the most lazy way, it’s a plodding and padded out story and it genuinely tries to take the premise serious. It’s becomes very difficult to stay immersed in the experience when characters give poe-faced delivery of lines like “sometimes the well has a wish on its own” or “something is wrong…with that swimming pool”.
Our protaganist family are the Wallers, headed by Ray and Eve (Russell and Condon), who are looking for a new home to aide his rehabilitation during extended illness. Picking one house in particular so the pool can facilitate water therapy, they get settled in and before long each member of the family experiences their own spooky moment with the pool. When Ray begins recovering from his illness, credit it given to the pool’s natural spring feed source, but Eve is becoming wary of the backyard feature. During a standard horror movie internet research session, she visits the standard horror movie Foreign Person Who Explains the Lore and discovers that the spring water is from an actual wishing well. As payment for healing Ray, the pool wants to kill one of the children.
There’s nothing clever about the concept or the origin of the pool, and this movie could have skated by on the scares but there’s so little consistency or logic to how any of it operates that it’s difficult to get on board with that aspect of the film. The pool can possess people, show people visions, voices of dead people can talk to people, it can psychically reach out to physically attack people in different locations, it can also seemingly control a glass that contains water that isn’t from the pool. Whatever the pool needs to do to move the story forward, it will do. There’s no rules or reason to any of it, the pool just makes whatever happens. If you’re going to turn out the standard genre tropes, you should at least include the bit where the characters outline the ‘rules’ fo the haunting.
There’s a few different ways they could have taken this concept. A camp, tongue-in-check, fun horror movie would work, or maybe it could have been an opportunity to build suspense or mystery about the origin. There’s nothing interesting about how the hauntings manifest, it’s either the same ghostly faces we see in everything or just dirty water sneaking around. When the lack of pay-off, inconsistent approach to the hauntings and flat, dry tone get mixed together we’re left with a pool that should have been drained.
Rating: TWO out of TEN
