Image courtesy of IMDb
Hello, everyone.
I am back with my first review of 2024, and as was the case last year, it’s for a horror movie (and with the same distributor and production companies involved, too).
This is an interesting case, though, as it’s the first time that I’ll actually be covering a horror movie adapted from a short.
As I hinted at last time, this comes to us from Universal, who managed to make the ocean scarier than we already believed it to be back in 1975*.
This time, they aim to make a swimming pool scary.
Before I get started, I will be mentioning the short here and there for context purposes, as I did see it before the movie.
However, you don’t have to worry so much about spoilers for the short, because it is only 3 minutes long, and there’s not much to go by there compared to the movie.
Though pools are not as unsettling as the ocean can be, there are still some potentially frightening aspects to being near them or in them.
Folks, you might want to have some gear ready anyway, as we dive into my review of Night Swim.
The story follows the Waller family as they move into a new house with a pool in the backyard. The father, Ray, is a baseball player forced into an early retirement due to illness, and so he hopes that the pool will help with physical therapy in addition to being something fun for his children. Unfortunately, the pool harbors a terrifying past, and then something deeper comes back to haunt them.
What Worked: Given how this is the first horror movie of the year**, I went in with minimal expectations. The trailer looked interesting, and it had at least a couple people I recognized in it.
The biggest name is Wyatt Russell (Kurt Russell’s son) as Ray, and for me, he had the best performance in the movie. He does really well at showing his character’s plight, and at showing concern for himself and his family.
As his wife, Eve, we have Kerry Condon (who you may recognize as the voice of F.R.I.D.A.Y., the second AI assistant of Tony Stark, as well as from shows like Rome and Better Call Saul). I also really liked her here, and the children I didn’t mind, either.
Basically, the acting was fine, and the cast made the most of the material they were given.
There were two things that stood out to me.
The first is Bryce McGuire’s direction. For his feature debut (he also wrote and directed the short), there were some very impressive shots here.
I did also like how the lights would go off and back on as a sign that what’s in the pool is coming for you. It worked in the short, and I thought they did fine enough expanding upon it a bit here.
The second thing is Mark Korven’s score. While not as good as his score for The Black Phone, it is still very effective.
What Didn’t Work: The plot, while interesting, isn’t given potential to have more done with it. The biggest example of this is what makes the pool here so frightening. Now, of course, I will not give away the twist. I’ll just say this: There’s a frightening concept behind it, which I felt could’ve worked if there was better execution.
In fact, they could’ve hinted at it in its entirety in the marketing, and it wouldn’t have made any difference. I’ll get back to that towards the end.
With the big reveal that we do get, though, the biggest issue is that it doesn’t make sense. Again, I can’t go into it, but in addition to not making sense, it felt like one of the easiest ways to get out of a corner they wrote themselves into. When it happened, I thought, “That’s the best you came up with?”. After that, it also felt rushed.
In other words, the script itself needed more work, particularly the third act and the dialogue. Though there were a couple instances where the dialogue is just shockingly bad, it’s mostly generic horror movie dialogue.
The twist wasn’t predictable, because they kind of foreshadowed it with a character who’s only in one scene early on in the movie. The thing that was most predictable, if anything, was the ending.
Now for what horror fans would come to see… I’m going to have to disappoint you. In terms of scares, this does not stick the landing. The first two acts had some moments I thought were fine, but the third act deflates all of that. As with M3GAN, this is PG-13, and as I said with that, it holds it back from going all the way. If this was R, it more than likely would’ve.
Plus, if it was R, it could’ve taken advantage of the biggest opportunity a plot like this could offer, which is have creative kills in it. Even if some were so absurd that they made me laugh, I still would’ve given them credit for that. For example, if they did something like use the Polaris cleaner as a weapon, there’s a few ways they could’ve done that.
Unfortunately, because it’s PG-13, this doesn’t have that. For horror movies, being PG-13 can work (the Quiet Place films and Lights Out (which was also based on a short), for example), but this is further evidence that it doesn’t always work.
It also could’ve benefitted from having an original idea for what’s beneath the pool, or something familiar with a unique spin on it.
Not only is what we get unoriginal and not scary, but I’m not exaggerating when I say this: I’ve had a pool before, and I’ve seen scarier things while cleaning the skimmers than what you see in this movie.
It doesn’t help that they decided to give some of it away in the second trailer (not all of it, thankfully; I was also expecting that going in***).
They did this with M3GAN’s second trailer, where a lot of the third act was given away, and they did a similar thing here.
Basically, this is another case of how marketing largely still goes unevaluated, despite constant, neverending complaints that trailers now keep spoiling the movie more often than not.
Overall: While it sounds like I despised Night Swim (like a lot of people have), given the positives I do have, I didn’t.
If nothing else, it’s more wasted potential than something that I would have as an easy contender for a Worst Of List.
As a movie, I thought it was okay, but when I see potential for a movie to do more, and it’s not fully reached, I have to address as much as I can without going into spoilers.
Therefore, I ultimately felt more let down than outright angry coming home from the theater.
As mentioned earlier, there are some things I would say to see it for, provided you were actually going to.
If anyone reading this was (and still is) interested to see it, if you really have to go to the theater, go ahead, but for everyone else, you’re better off waiting for it to hit streaming.
Next time, we see Jason Statham performing a different kind of sting operation… one that puts even Nicolas Cage to shame.
*In a sense of irony, Jaws served as one of the inspirations for this, as did at least one other movie… that I will get to later.
**January’s almost always like this. There’s hardly any instances where the year starts right off the bat with something good. While I could go on, I don’t want to repeat myself. Otherwise, I would be making the same points I pretty much established when I reviewed M3GAN last year, so for anyone unfamiliar on why January is often not a great month for movies (particularly with horror movies), just go to that review for those points, and then come back.
***There were at least a couple other things I was expecting going in, but I would have to go into spoilers for that.