Night Swim

by Mike McGranaghan

A year ago, Kerry Condon was an Oscar nominee for her magnificent performance in The Banshees of Inisherin. Now she’s starring in a movie about a killer swimming pool. Show business sure is a funny thing, isn’t it? The actress is easily the best part of Night Swim, a tale that either needed to be way less silly or way more silly. As it stands, the picture does for pools what Jaws did for beach chairs and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre did for refrigerators. That is to say, absolutely nothing.

Eve Walter and her husband Ray (Wyatt Russell) are new homeowners. He’s a baseball player dealing with worsening MS. They figure the pool in the backyard will allow him to have regular water therapy. Daughter Izzy (Amelie Hoeferle) and son Elliot (Gavin Warren) dig it, too. The water does indeed help Ray, miraculously so. The others all see weird figures in and around the pool when they use it. Elliot even talks to the voice of a little girl coming from one of the skimmers.

You know the drill here. It involves a past death, a water source that contains some sort of evil, and the need for a sacrifice. The number of tired horror conventions Night Swim pulls out is almost impressive. Writer/director Bryce McGuire has no new inspiration – aside from, you know, a killer swimming pool – so he leans heavily on cliches that date back at least as far as 1982’s Poltergeist. Maybe further. The laziness of the story is frustrating. I correctly guessed what the last shot would be about half an hour in.

Swimming pools have been successfully used for scares in films like The Strangers: Prey at Night, Let the Right One In and It Follows. Any of those individual scenes is scarier than the whole of Night Swim. McGuire tries to stage a tense game of Marco Polo between Izzy and her prospective boyfriend, but it’s ludicrous watching her calling out “Marco!” while a shadowy entity hovers underwater beneath her. Another moment tries to wring terror out of a game of Chicken to similarly lame effect. The big finale, meanwhile, entails two characters wrestling with a pool cover. None of it is frightening or tense.

In fairness, the movie is dumb enough to be weirdly watchable. There’s something curious about how it carries out the idiotic killer pool concept with great, bordering on delusional, seriousness. Condon invests the plot with just enough sincerity to make you wish everything else was much better. When Eve visits the former homeowner, the star makes her worry authentic, despite the theatrics involving a gurgling fountain and a woman oozing black gunk from her eyeballs.

Night Swim wants to be entertaining for real. Instead, it’s pseudo-entertaining in an “Are they serious?!” manner. If you stumbled across it on cable in the middle of the night, you might soldier through the movie out of dumbfounded amusement. Don’t mistake that for an endorsement.

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