Universal Pictures
Happy New Year! It’s January and it’s become a bit (stereo)typical that the first movie released in January is a movie the studio knows will flop, knows will get the harshest of critical reaction, so just dumps it on the first or second weekend of the month. But following the success of Escape Room on the first weekend of January 2019, studios have found that low-budget horror films actually do work and are almost critic proof when it comes to drawing in the film’s target audience — mostly teens and early 20s movie-goers. Ensuring thte film carries a less-restrictive PG-13 rating also helps. This year two titans of cinematic horror, Blumhouse (The Invisible Man) and Atomic Monster (The Conjuring), have teamed up — and are now officially a merged studio entity — to bring us some thrills and chills with Night Swim, a title that seems a bit at odds with the actual story, a lot of which takes place during the day.
The film opens in 1982. The sister of a seriously ill brother spots his toy boat in the backyard, in-ground pool so she goes to retrieve it for him. Something pulls the girl into the pool and before anyone can do anything, she vanishes. Cut to the present — we assume since there is no onscreen indication of the time period — and a new family moves into the house. Dad Ray Waller (Wyatt Russell) is a former baseball player in the early stages of MS. Mom Eve (Kerry Condon) is about to start a job in the admistrative office of a local school, which her kids Izzy and Elliot will also be attending. Searching for a new home to accommodate Ray they turn down a ‘smart home’, which Ray feels would be like living in a hospital, for a large two-story home with a pool. Ray convinces his wife that this is the place because he can use the pool for his aqua therapy. Apparently the price is more than affordable as the house has been on the market for some time. The Wallers learn that the pool’s water source is a nearby spring instead of the municiple water supply, and after some very quick work the pool is filled and ready to use. Ray begins to feel better and his medical reports are surprising, but his kids are beginning to feel that something isn’t quite right with the pool. Things come to a head at a ‘welcome to the neighborhood’ pool party when Ray nearly drowns himself and another boy on the school baseball team, and Eve finally gets the truth out of her realtor about the missing girl and other mysterious disappearances connected not just to the pool, but to the spring itself. With Ray acting strange, Eve senses her children are in danger but can she act before it’s too late?
As I mentioned earlier, the film’s title is a bit misleading since a lot of the pool-related terror actually happens in bright daylight. According to IMDb the film was originally known as Wishing Well, which makes a whole lot more sense since there are quite a few references to wishing wells in the film, not the least of which is the practice of tossing quarters into the pool for the kids to retrieve to help them practice holding their breath underwater. It’s also the main thrust of the story — Ray is subconsciously wishing for his health to be restored when he uses the pool, so there has to be something given to the water in exchange for that wish. In the case of the magical spring, it’s a human life. It’s actually a fairly effective story even if there are a few questionable plotholes like … the possession aspect. Also at one point the pool is drained and the water runs down into the gutter, presumably into the city’s water system. That can’t be good, can it? We just have to ignore that and move on. And what about that JV Christian Swim Team Izzy is invited to join? Seems like if you’re going to explicitly bring a religious element into the story about possession, you’d run with that but it’s as quickly dropped as Izzy drops Ronin, the boy who extends the invite and sneaks over for a night swim with Izzy (hey, the title works in this case!)
The cast, as side from Ray and Eve, is made up of mostly ‘unknowns’ (I did recognize the realtor but she’s not even given the courtesy of a credit on the IMDb page for the movie). Amélie Hoeferle and Gavin Warren are fine as Izzy and Elliot, unfortunately we don’t really get to know a lot about them. It seems that Izzy is not Ray’s daughter which may explain some of her animosity toward Elliot. Elliot seems extremely shy, very introverted and overly protected, but we don’t really know why but he seems to have issues with living in his father’s shadow, demonstrated by his reaction to the school’s baseball team crowding around Ray when he hits a ball out of the park during a team practice. Poor Elliot was just starting to feel good about himself but Ray made him feel insufficient again.
I also found it hard to warm up to Kerry Condon’s Eve. Yeah, the character has a lot on her plate but Eve always seems pissed off even when she isn’t. It’s like she’d rather have been anyplace but in this movie. I really want to like Wyatt Russell. His acting style perfectly fit his role in the late, lamented Lodge 49 (ironically his character on that show loved the water but feared it after a shark attack), a very laid back surfer dude named Dud. But he’s always too laid back, from Overlord to Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (where he unfortunately has to share a role with dad Kurt, who is a decidedly more magnetic personality). He’s just always behaving like ‘yeah, that happened, moving on’ so there’s never a real sense of urgency to the situation (although he does let loose a little during his possession scenes). They are all fine but perhaps a more experienced feature director could have drawn stronger performances from the cast.
I was also unaware until seeing the film’s credits that Night Swim is adapted from a short film of the same title written and directed by the film’s director, Bryce McGuire. Having just viewed the short to compare for this review, well … it’s got the slimmest premise on which to build a feature film but it does take place during a night swim! TO be fair, Night Swim does have a few good scares, and I appreciated that McGuire kept most of the entities involved with the pool/spring hidden, only half seen or in silhouette. Much better than shining a spotlight on them, which would rob them of their terror. So points for that. (I have to take off a point for the presumed death of a cat, though.) For a major film with a budget of just about $15 million, Night Swim is handsomely produced, and from a technical standpoint is on par with any big budget film, certainly one of the hallmarks of a Blumhouse film. It may not be as effective a horror film as The Invisible Man or as loopy as M3GAN, but it works on its terms and should be a real crowd-pleaser for the target audience. For once, this is a first week of January movie that isn’t all wet.
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