98 min | PG-13 | January 5, 2024 | Universal Pictures
Blumhouse turns a backyard pool into a horror villain. The pool is scarier than the movie.
The pitch writes itself. A family moves into a house with a swimming pool that has dark supernatural powers. The father is a former baseball player forced into early retirement by a degenerative illness. The pool heals him. The pool also wants something in return. This is a Blumhouse production, which means the concept is high and the budget is low and the execution lands somewhere between competent and forgettable. Night Swim lands on the forgettable side.
Wyatt Russell plays Ray Waller with enough physical commitment to sell the deteriorating athlete. He does the work. Kerry Condon plays his wife Eve and brings more gravity than the script deserves. The two children exist to be threatened. The film asks Russell and Condon to be frightened of a swimming pool for ninety minutes. They try. The pool does not cooperate as a villain.
Bryce McGuire directs his first feature after expanding his own short film of the same name. The short worked because it was brief and suggestive. The feature has to fill space and chooses to fill it with backstory about previous owners and sacrificial mythology that explains too much and scares too little. The underwater sequences have some visual tension. The above-water scenes are flat. The PG-13 rating keeps the horror toothless.
Blumhouse has built an empire on cheap horror with strong concepts. Sometimes you get Get Out. Sometimes you get Night Swim. The concept is the entire movie. Once you know the pool is evil, there is nowhere interesting to go. The film goes there anyway and takes ninety-eight minutes to arrive.