Night Swim Review
Theatrical Movie Review - Horror
Last year, “M3GAN” came out on the first weekend of January. A PG-13 horror movie released this early in the year generally doesn’t have a lot of hope, but that one managed to subvert this reviewer's expectations. This year, Jason Blum’s Bumhouse studio is teaming up with James Wan’s Atomic Monster studio to bring us a new film from writer/director Bryce McGuire with less successful results.
Ray Waller (Wyatt Russell) is a baseball professional who has been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis and needs to find a place to settle down. With his wife Eve (Kerry Condon) and his kids Izzy (Amelie Hoeferle) and Elliot (Gavin Warren), they find an inexpensive home in the school district where Eve will be working. Best of all, it has a natural spring pool in the backyard, perfect for the low-impact exercises that Ray needs to do. The family loves their new home, and Ray begins to find himself feeling better, but soon, the malevolent spirit that lives in the water will be looking to extract its price for that healing.
While I don’t think this movie had much of a chance to soar, I at least hoped that it would be a good enough time at the theater. And at the start, it seemed like that would be the case. There were some mildly creepy elements that appeared could string together in a way that worked, but ultimately, by the third act, the tonal dissonance was such that the whole movie felt flat and uninteresting.
The performances in the movie were fine, but the movie belied the talent of the two lead actors. Both have some real bona fides, but were wildly underused in this movie. They both came across as somewhat wooden in their performances, leaving me wanting something more.
As I mentioned, the third act is where this movie falls apart. The overall setup for what is happening is pretty well laid out in the first two acts, and while it follows a relatively predictable story, the elements work well enough. Some CGI elements were lacking, but this film is relatively low budget, so that wasn’t a game over for me. But when the movie didn’t trust the audience to understand what was happening and instead went for a full exposition dump to explain it, it lost me. I could have forgiven even that if there had been some further development of the source of the evil, but it simply rehashed elements we had already watched just a scene or two earlier. It then jumped into a weird comedic tone that was the opposite of everything we had experienced up to that point.
Ultimately, “Night Swim” felt like a film that got to the end, realized that it hadn’t used some horror tropes from a checklist, and jammed them all into the final act. So, instead of a nice dip in the pool, it felt like someone dousing me with cold water.
This review originally appeared in The Dominion Post on January 7, 2024.