Last Updated on January 12, 2024
PLOT: A family moves into a new house, and their pool doesn’t appear all that it seems. Soon they’re terrorized by an evil spirit who wants one thing: death.
REVIEW: Night Swim serves as the first release by Blumhouse and Atomic Monster after their recent merger. After being separate powerhouses of horror, it’s easy to imagine many good things coming from this partnership. Unfortunately, no one seemed to tell Jason Blum and James Wan that they should probably start with a good movie first. Because Night Swim is drowning from the onset.
The idea of a haunted swimming pool is intriguing enough on its own. Add a family moving in and the constant threat of the water and you’ve got an interesting time at the cinema. Then combine the acting talents of Wyatt Russell and Kerry Condon and all signs point to good. At least you’d think that. But Night Swim manages to tread water in the most mundane ways. From various unintentionally funny moments to a half-baked ending, this is simply bad. But I don’t like to always be a negative Nancy so I’ll focus on something positive.
Condon is great as the lead. I’m always blown away by this woman just for how good her American accent is. But it’s her acting that helps sell a lot of the dumber moments. Russell seems to be enjoying having a lighter role than tends to be the norm for him. He’s fine but Ray, like most characters here, is so ineffective with everything they do. They seem to just meander through every moment. Even after the pool is a clear threat, they don’t treat it as such. It’s more of a minor inconvenience.
There are some subtle character moments that I really enjoyed. The look of pure terror on the family’s face when Ray (Russell) hits a home run is wonderful. They’re seeing all the uprooting, all the moving over and over again, rushing through their minds. In a moment of pure hope for the father, is pure devastation for the others as they know what it means. But those kinds of moments are so few and far between. The film is much more obsessed with jump scares and reaching slowing out over the pool, trying to grab something. I lost track of the number of times these instances happen.
One of the strangest decisions, and this is common in all of marketing these days, is spoiling one of the big scares of the film. The Marco Polo scene that is spotlighted in the trailer is one of the only good moments of tension in the movie. Only the version that’s here isn’t even as tense as the trailer. I’m not sure if they shortened it up due to most of it playing out already, but it was an odd choice. Also odd is the decision to have so much ridiculous CGI. And it all looks bad, taking any tension away from their appearances. The PG-13 rating doesn’t help.
If you’re still on board by the third act, there are enough dumb decisions to change that. From an underdeveloped Amityville Horror-style turn to some more awful CGI, it’s terrible on top of more bad. At a certain point, the screenwriters are simply trying to check off horror tropes. There are so many ideas here, and none are focused on any satisfying conclusion. The water is the monster, no it’s ghosts, no it’s the dad–make up your mind! It’s all so convoluted. By the time the ending happens, I was rooting for the characters to continue their awful decision-making and end this already.
Blumhouse and Atomic Monster are quickly losing their goodwill among this horror fan and releases like this aren’t helping things. An overreliance on CGI is all too common and the fact that they haven’t course corrected is a big concern. If you’re going to limit your films to a certain budget, then limiting the FX should be priority number one. While we’ve had great examples of horror shorts being made into great adaptations, Night Swim is not one of them.
NIGHT SWIM RELEASES IN THEATERS ON JANUARY 5TH, 2023.
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