Blumhouse Productions kicked off 2023’s horror slate with M3GAN, a slick, sleek and timely “free-thinking killer doll” movie that chimed perfectly with creeping concern about the existential threat posed by the rise of AI. Hopes that they could repeat the trick in 2024 with Night Swim are dashed almost immediately; this one deserves to sink without a trace, offering up little more than a few lukewarm thrills from its thin and watery story of something nasty lurking in a domestic swimming pool.
The house-hunting Waller family – ex-baseball star Ray (Wyatt Russell), his wife Eve (Kerry Condon) and their kids Izzy (Amelie Hoeferle) and Elliot (Gavin Warren) – are attracted to a long-unoccupied property mainly due to the fact that it has a grubby, tarpaulin-covered but alluring swimming pool. Ray is living with the early stages of MS, and when the family move in and tidies the place up – restoring the pool to its former glory – they are amazed to find that regular sessions in the pool are easing his symptoms. But all’s not right with the pool… During an illicit night swim, Izzy is spooked by something in the water (a scene that seems to exist purely to justify the film’s title) with her boyfriend, and a pool party for the neighbourhood nearly ends in tragedy. But as Ray’s health continues to improve, Eve discovers that the house and its pool share a grisly history and that the lives of both Izzy and Elliot are in danger from Ray who isn’t quite the man he was.
Night Swim isn’t terrible, but the truth is that it’s difficult to make a swimming pool seem properly scary. The concept of the bottom of the pool opening up into a gateway to an aquatic domain where previous victims persist as ghoulish, grasping spectres is neither fully explained nor explored, and the film ultimately degenerates into lazy possession cliches as it tumbles headlong into absurdity in its desperation to provide an exciting climax. Inessential horror, your enjoyment of Night Swim will deep-end on how many tepid jump scares you’re prepared to wade through and if that’s enough to float your boat, dive in. But all in all, this is a film that does little more than tread water; it’s a bit of a wash-out.
Night Swim is in cinemas now
