Night Swim (2024) Review!!

Synopsis – Follows a suburban family who discover that their backyard swimming pool is haunted.

My Take – While there have been many films over the years that have reinforced the notion about why we should be afraid of going into any form of water, this latest horror from producers Jason Blum and James Wan uniquely sets its concept around a haunted pool. But while writer-director Bryce McGuire and co-writer Rob Blackhurst try their best to expand upon their 4-minute 2014 short film, the results are unfortunately quite tepid and mundane.

In an effort, to expand upon their short to feature-length, they resort to over-familiar horror tropes, including convoluted explanations of the origins of the invisible menace, stranding their potentially interesting characters in increasingly rote suspense scenes.

Though it’s made competently enough, but despite being termed a horror, there are hardly any real scares or thrills, and just struggles to maintain any kind of tension, despite the cast trying their best to keep some interest alive. It’s a real shame that between the opening and the central reveal, the film just fails to entice or unnerve with far too much filler and empty jump scares.

Sure, it does not have the worst idea to emotionally ground the story either, but the constant theme of sacrifice gets hammered into over and over from the beginning, becoming the only baseline on which the film operates.

It also doesn’t take any chances and relies heavily on previously-existing material losing any potential for it to stand on its own, becoming a shallow genre exercise. Here’s hoping Atomic Monster and Blumhouse come up with something better in the near future.

The story follows the Waller family, consisting of Ray (Wyatt Russell), Eve (Kerry Condon) and their kids Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle) and Elliot (Gavin Warren). Ray was a famous pro baseball player seemingly on the verge of a resurgence when he got diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, bringing his playing days and the family’s itinerant lifestyle to an end. Even Eve is tired of having to put the kids through move after move whenever he’s traded, and she’s got her own new job as a school admin.

So it’s wonderfully coincidental when they spot an expansive house in the suburbs for far too good a price, that too with a pool in the backyard – a filthy, disused one that hasn’t seen chlorine in years. But when Ray fixes it up and starts using it, his symptoms suddenly begin to dissipate and he’s back to swinging the bat like he never put it down. However, Eve, Izzy and Elliot encounter disturbing sights while swimming, and become convinced that something ominous lies beneath its surface.

The opening scene shows us a tragic event that occurred in this same pool a few years back. Nothing is given away, but it’s an ominous start that is expertly filmed. The Waller family is well-defined, and there’s a slow burn mystery regarding what’s actually going on with the pool. In its early scenes, the film taps into aqua phobia and those universal childhood anxieties of a neighborhood pool that does not seem so safe.

But as the mysteries behind the strange occurrences are slowly revealed, this under-powered horror film starts to drown in clichés and predictable plot twists.

Though cinematographer Charlie Sarroff (Smile) does nice work with the pool, especially the underwater scenes at night, other than the kinda idea that a swimming pool can possess evil, the film clunks along by touching on numerous ideas, some of which are creative, only to leave us hanging on most.

The horror surrounding the pool oscillates from a more straightforward ghost story to a monster film, with aspects of possession films and cosmic horror thrown in. All these elements are fine on their own, but the way they’re shuffled around here creates a narrative that doesn’t truly have a solid leg to stand on.

Here, writer-director Bryce McGuire and co-writer Rob Blackhurst lean heavy on films like The Ring (2002), The Amityville Horror (1979), and Poltergeist (1982) to flesh out their own original short. And still none of the big horror moments, save for the prologue, feel timed correctly. Jump scares fall flat and moments of suspense play predictably.

The performances are the only thing holding the narrative together. Wyatt Russell is likable as a broken family man trying to hide his grief from his family. Kerry Condon is believable as the loving parent and wife who wants to hold her family together. Amélie Hoeferle and Gavin Warren are decent as the children, and in the spirit of fairness the script does attempt to give them their own arcs. On the whole, ‘Night Swim’ is a lukewarm supernatural horror that drowns in its own clichéd elements.