Just a few months ago, during the Blumfest panel at New York Comic Con, producer Jason Blum praised James Wan’s ability to “make the ordinary scary” when showcasing Night Swim on stage, but that may have been a bit premature. Night Swim is an overwhelmingly dull and unintentionally hilarious dive into the pool, with a cast that does their best to sell the hell out of this popped pool floaty of a movie that’ll leave you feeling like you just swam into the warm part of the water.
“We Have A Pool”
Night Swim is based on a 2014 short of the same name, directed by Rod Blackhurst and Bryce Maguire, with Maguire returning to direct this one. The short film runs quite brief, under 4 minutes, which is what helped it work and garner so much attention to warrant a feature film. Unfortunately, here I think they just missed the point as this isn’t something that works in this format, hell the concept itself just doesn’t work at all when you try to flesh it out, it is just goofy. The fact that just needs to be faced is that Pools are not scary.
I hate to sound reductive but the concept itself just doesn’t work at all. You can give something like an evil pool all the background you want but in the end, you find yourself back at a pool. While obviously, the short film doesn’t have the time to give any background on the pool or the monster that lives within, the film tries to add something to it and give it an origin of sorts but never really fleshes it out enough to make you care, only offering a quick little exposition dump. It spends way too much time building up to something but you get there and find yourself kinda just confused about what you’re watching. The short itself worked much better because it was just that, a short. Its undivulged and mysterious origins leave the rest to your imagination, which helps it succeed over the feature-length film.
Diving In
The film starts by giving a little background about the house’s previous occupants and their earlier encounters with the demonic pool, setting up the conflicts to come later. The problem is that at least 75% of this film feels like we’re just watching the day-to-day lives of some people who moved into a house that needs some TLC. The pool itself feels like it’s on the backburner but then they keep remembering that they need to handle it.
Hell, a bulk of the film focuses on the fact that Wyatt Russell ‘s character is a former Baseball player like they constantly are reminding you that he played in the major league. If you take out what little actual night swimming there is, you’ve got a story about a former baseball player who is working on one day returning to the diamond.
Later on in the film, a few rules are established for the pool and what lives within, stating that the pool requires a sacrifice for its magical properties to be unlocked. However, these rules upon their introduction had already technically been contradicted earlier in the film upon the assumed death of the family pet, a cat named Cider. It isn’t specified that the death had to be human and it just leaves you scratching your head.
You Will Probably Swim Again
Calling this movie scary would be considered charity and you could probably write the price of the ticket off on your taxes. The film does its best to strike some fear into you and make you fear returning to any pool but the scariest thing about this was how gross it was in the beginning because no one had used it in over a decade.
One of the central problems with the film is that the pool is the absence of a sole antagonist beyond the pool. The trailers may lead you to believe that there is one sole entity that calls the deep-end home, but it’s just a bunch of different spirits that are used for cheap jumpscares. Much of the work put into making these different spirits cannot even be applauded because so many of them are in a blink and you’ll miss moments that don’t even matter or it is just way too dark.
The Wallers Are Here!
One of the best things about the film is its cast. Led by Wyatt Russell and Kerry Condon (how?), as Ray and Eve Waller, who sell the hell out of what they’re given. The script is just laughably bad and I honestly cannot tell if that was the point or not.
Sometimes you just have to sit back and applaud the commitment to the bit because some of the moments in this film will have you bursting out laughing rather than looking away. I seriously think that Russell could do quite well in the comedy genre with his line delivery in some of these scenes.
Condon herself is good, as good as she can be, and is enjoyable enough to watch as she unravels the mysterious circumstances surrounding the monster living in her backyard.
‘Night Swim’ – Final Thoughts
James Wan’s good name can only carry a film so far, and unfortunately, this film barely makes it out of the shallow end. Night Swim will give you a good laugh here and there and the cast may be entertaining at certain points but overall the film finds itself flailing for a lifeguard the rest of the time.
Check out the trailer for the film below:
