Review: Night Swim

Director:  Bryce McGuire

Stars:  Kerry Condon, Amélie Hoeferle, Wyatt Russell

Customarily and save for the odd prestige picture, January is a dumping ground for the titles that studios aren’t entirely confident about – this goes double for horror commodities, it seems – and lo and behold here’s Universal and Blumhouse in the first weekend of the year with a movie about a killer swimming pool.

Expanding upon a 2014 short also by Bryce McGuire and his co-author Rod Blackhurst, Night Swim continues a long tradition of Cursed Inanimate Object Movies that usually trade on our materialistic guilt or the shame of affluence (anyone else remember how The Bye Bye Man was ultimately about a nasty bedside table??).

I might sound mocking, but there’s a hefty heritage here, not least in the work of Stephen King (think Christine or the (underrated) The Mangler), or the chilling recesses of J-horror (usually entwined with technophobia). Indeed, both are pointed touchstones for this admirable if not always successful attempt to round a concept out to feature length. Night Swim is at its best when it gets creative with how to frame different fears and scares around its back garden asset; at its worst when it cleaves closer to pop horror cliché to get the job done.

Meet the Wallers. Father Ray (Wyatt Russell) was once a contender for the baseball major leagues, until an MS diagnosis reconfigured his future. His wife Eve (Kerry Condon) is rallying to support him through these huge changes to his lifestyle. Her own ambition is to teach special needs, evidencing an earnest altruistic streak. The family is rounded out by their two kids, Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle) and Elliot (Gavin Warren).

As is the tradition of many American horror stories, it all begins with a house move. On the market at an affordable rate thanks to its murky history, the Wallers snap up a spacious detachment suburban home for a song, but its the swimming pool in the back yard that becomes the mainstay of their social and domestic activities. For Ray it promises much; he needs to rehabilitate his body and aqua-aerobics is recommended. Elliot is like a duck to water as is, while Izzy is inclined to join a school swim team thanks to the advances of a horny Christian.

McGuire wastes no time instilling a sense of wrongness about the pool. Most effective – arguably throughout – are the faltering lights which flicker ominously. There’s a commensurate sound cue that occurs whenever they shut off that haunts the picture really well. A lot is done with little. Less successful are the moments where a little is done with a lot, and Night Swim is not above clunky fake-outs, jump scares or regretfully lumpy ghouls appearing out of nowhere. One here looks quite unfortunately like someone smooshed Dave Bautista and Uncle Fester together; its a lot funnier than it is ‘scary’.

As the threat is left ill-defined until Eve gets fearful enough to do a Google search (that ol’ mid horror movie chestnut), the ‘abilities’ of the killer swimming pool flex according to the type of tricks McGuire wants to play with. Sometimes there are creepy entities gurgling in the filter (a riff torn straight out of IT), sometimes the murky water itself is an infecting agent like the black oil from The X-Files, occasionally the pool can transcend the laws of time and space. It all depends what the Waller family are up-to. This thing is sentient and impressively adaptable.

By the time a neighbourhood pool party takes place one starts to feel the strain to embellish this thing out to feature running time, so its unfortunate that a lot of the stronger material appears early on, before the exact nature of the threat is more generously sketched in. McGuire and Blackhurst scramble out of the shallow end with some clumsy metaphors about sickness, sacrifice and family unity, but it starts to feel a bit busy come the third act thrashing about. Condon is the standout performer through it all, doing right by her character even in something as throwaway as this.

Night Swim is okay if you go into it with the appropriate January expectations. The dialogue contains a handful of howlers but nothing you’re going to remember to quote with your friends a few hours later. Indeed, its around that time that most memories of the picture will start dancing away from you like reflections of water shimmering on glass. There’s some charm and ingenuity here, but equal helpings of the hokey and derivative pretty much balance the scales.