From Jeremy Kibler

Blumhouse’s modest-budget model has proven to be effective time and time again, but not every idea can be a winner. A haunted swimming pool is a solid start for a high-concept horror feature that started as a 2014 short film from Rod Blackhurst and Bryce McGuire. What makes this expansion all the more disappointing is that it’s McGuire’s feature writing-directing debut. The water is not so fine, and neither is Night Swim.

Whereas the three-odd-minute short involved a young woman (Megalyn Echikunwoke) taking an actual night swim in her own pool, here we have the Waller family moving into a new house, complete with an in-ground swimming pool that comes with a past. It’s great physical therapy for husband and father Ray (Wyatt Russell), a former major league baseball player who’s forced into early retirement by a degenerative illness. To the surprise of both his wife, Eve (Kerry Condon), and his doctor, Ray’s health dramatically improves, and the kids, teenage daughter Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle) and younger son Elliot (Gavin Warren), love the pool! But before you can say, “get out of the water!” and “don’t stick your hand in there!” or give any other direction to the screen, there is something definitely wrong with that pool.

Being a swimmer myself, the water has still always come with an irrational fear of the unknown below. Writer-director McGuire certainly gets some mileage out of those fears lurking in the deep end. Right off the top in a 1992-set prologue, the filmmaker clearly pays homage to Jaws with a drowning. Shots from a swimmer’s point-of-view, breathing between each stroke, are effective, as are a few moments where the camera is half-surface and half-underwater, and a nightly game of Marco Polo between daughter Izzy and her crush nicely builds some apprehension. Mostly, though, the film falls short in how it fills out the rest of its runtime as an inferior rehash of a certain 1979 haunted-house oldie (just add a scary pool!).

There’s only so much time characters can spend in a pool, so much of the film does play like a saggy family drama. The Wallers feel like a real family, but when Ray’s connection to the pool becomes established, it’s hard not to giggle at the clunky hand-holding of constant flashbacks. Ray was a baseball star; we get it, movie! And when a character’s sacrifice elicits no emotional concern from the viewer, that’s also a problem. Finally, let’s put a moratorium on horror movies forcing characters (usually female) to make a Google search and then travel to interrogate a previous homeowner. The more mythology that gets explained about the haunted pool just gets silly, and the rules play fast and loose with their own internal logic. How can the waterlogged spirits even stand the chlorine? What have they been doing with their time in the drain and in the bottomless deep end until someone new came along?

Following her lovely, Oscar-nominated work in The Banshees of Inisherin, Kerry Condon fares the best, bringing emotional weight to mother and wife Eve that might not have existed on the page otherwise. To be fair, Eve does make all of the uncommonly smart choices you want from a horror-movie pawn. Wyatt Russell is also solid in dad mode, but when he has to play menacing, the unconvincing visual effects and the howlers he gets saddled with spouting do not help. Despite Condon putting in the work, both Eve and Ray Waller end up going through the same motions as the Lutzes from either version of The Amityville Horror. Credit is most certainly due to a few standout supporting turns, including a quirky Ben Sinclar, as a pool technician; a funny Nancy Lenhan, as the family’s realtor who may have left out the pool’s history; and Jodi Long, who gets stuck on “exposition duty” as the mother of one of the pool’s victims.

Had Night Swim taken a more suggestive, less-is-more approach and trusted its creepy simplicity, or gone completely nuts, we might have had a crowd-pleasing shrieker for the new year. As is, the scares are tepid at best and strictly for beginners who have only dipped their toes into horror movies.

Rating: 2/5

Night Swim hits theaters January 5, 2023.

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