Night Swim (2024)
Directed by Bryce McGuire
Forced into early retirement by a degenerative illness, former baseball player Ray Waller moves into a new house with his wife and two children. He hopes that the backyard swimming pool will be fun for the kids and provide physical therapy for himself. However, a dark secret from the home's past soon unleashes a malevolent force that drags the family into the depths of inescapable terror.
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McGuire also borrows liberally from the playbook of James Wan (who is not coincidentally a producer on the film), messing with the audience's sense of timing with his peek-a-boo terrors (there's even an ominous game of Marco Polo, recalling the first "The Conjuring" and its clapping game).
For a while, this mild, many-angled shocker, produced by horror impresarios James Wan and Jason Blum, seems to emerge from the same wellspring that spawned Insidious, Sinister, and The Conjuring. But unlike those deliciously scary tales of grieving families and ghostly invaders, Night Swim paddles in circles around inchoate human fears rather than diving furiously into a vortex of terror.
But with James Wan (“The Conjuring” and “Saw”) plastered on the poster as producer, McGuire keeps the tone somber even as the dialogue verges on the ridiculous. You’re not laughing with the movie, but at it when someone turns to the camera and says, “Let’s have a pool party!”
Perhaps this is because he's pulling so much from recognizable horror hits that we are inured; even the film's best sequence might be considered a riff on The Conjuring's sensational hide-and-clap sequence, notably constructed by Night Swim producer James Wan.
Given the calibre of horror talent on board with Night Swim (between them, producers Jason Blum and James Wan have such genre treats as the Halloween series, The Conjuring films, M3GAN and Malignant), as well as the fact that the short film it’s based on earned critical acclaim upon its release a decade ago, one would have hope when diving into Bryce McGuire‘s macabre waters.
And beneath that surface is precisely where the terror is meant to hide in Night Swim, the latest collaboration between Jason Blum’s Blumhouse and James Wan’s Atomic Monster film studios (responsible for The Conjuring Universe, Lights Out, Mortal Kombat, Malignant, and 2023’s runaway hit M3GAN).
“Night Swim” never waivers from pointing to the pool as the culprit, and the filmmakers cite “Poltergeist” (1982) as inspiration, but they wait too late in the film to establish the culprit, who is more of a vague concept, and instead devote a lot of time to showing the effect of its malfeasance.
Sometimes, like 2020’s The Grudge reboot or 2017’s The Bye Bye Man, they turn out to be reminiscent of the old pattern of January horror – a lackluster (at best) effort dumped in the post-holiday hangover period to try and lure audiences who aren’t in the mood for a much-hyped award contender.
Given the calibre of horror talent on board with Night Swim (between them, producers Jason Blum and James Wan have such genre treats as the Halloween series, The Conjuring films, M3GAN and Malignant), as well as the fact that the short film it's based on earned critical acclaim upon its release a decade ago, one would have hope when diving into Bryce McGuire‘s macabre waters.
And beneath that surface is precisely where the terror is meant to hide in Night Swim, the latest collaboration between Jason Blum's Blumhouse and James Wan's Atomic Monster film studios (responsible for The Conjuring Universe, Lights Out, Mortal Kombat, Malignant, and 2023's runaway hit M3GAN).
It’s sad, then, that almost exactly one year later, the same producers cannot seem to continue the tradition with Night Swim, a horror that certainly carries an eye-opening premise as M3GAN did, but with very little of the overall entertainment that turned it into a mini-phenomenon.
It was because of my positive memories of M3GAN that I decided to let myself get excited for writer/director Bryce McGuire’s Night Swim. With the films being produced by the same studios and released at the same time of year, I willfully let the marketing machine manipulate me into thinking that there would be correlation in the experiences, and that I would walk away from the 2024 feature with similar cinematic satisfaction as what I experienced in January 2023.
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For a while, this mild, many-angled shocker, produced by horror impresarios James Wan and Jason Blum, seems to emerge from the same wellspring that spawned Insidious, Sinister, and The Conjuring. But unlike those deliciously scary tales of grieving families and ghostly invaders, Night Swim paddles in circles around inchoate human fears rather than diving furiously into a vortex of terror.
This light allusion to It becomes groan-inducing when another kid follows a toy toward the pool filter, which looks so much like the sewer grate setup of Pennywise the Clown attacking doomed Georgie that it flat-out feels like plagiarism.
A film like “Smile” (2022) worked despite inventing a brand-new demon with a new mythology because the rules were simple and clear whereas McGuire and Blackhurst’s approach supplants existing European folklore, which surprisingly has no sinister underbelly, about water, and viewers must wait until the denouement for the film to spell out what is happening. Even after this explanation, the rules are still somewhat inscrutable.
Cinematographer Charlie Sarroff is no stranger to fright flicks. Having worked on films like Relic (2020) and Smile (2022), there’s some solid work incorporating surrounding darkness. Most of the underwater filming is excellent, especially at night. The eerie glow of the water coupled with rippli…