I’ve written in this space before of my fondness for the January Horror Dump, the yearly ritual in which the studios, having released their Oscar contenders into the world, sneak out their slate of, uh, less reputable offerings. As a critic, the dump offers a chance to let my hair down a little bit, to take a break from several months of beautiful and thought-provoking cinema and settle into some good, old-fashioned schlock. I’m generally so excited for the January Horror Dump, however, that I often forget about the defining aspect of the season: most of these movies aren’t very good. Night Swim is perhaps the quintessential January horror film, a mid-concept haunted house variant whose concept is just ludicrous enough to be enticing, but which is ultimately almost defiantly unremarkable.
Night Swim follows the off-the-rack formula of Blumhouse Productions (who are roughly to the January Horror Dump what Corman’s companies were to the drive-in), following yet another nuclear American family settling into yet another midsize suburban palace. Patriarch Ray Waller (Wyatt Russell) is a newly retired MLB player navigating the early stages of multiple sclerosis; his wife, Eve (Kerry Condon, in a frankly depressing step down from The Banshees of Inisherin), is nervous about this new stage of their life, but looks forward to planting roots and finding a permanent home to raise their two children. They choose a house with a pool as much for its therapeutic properties as for recreation, and at first Ray shows remarkable signs of improvement. But the family’s swims soon grow less and less relaxing: they see unexplained figures peering in from under the water, and young Elliott hears a little girl’s voice beckoning from the filter. I really shouldn’t need to tell you that the realtor may have left out a few chapters in the house’s history, or that the pool may have been dug into cursed land, and I certainly don’t need to tell you that the Wallers soon find themselves reckoning with forces beyond their comprehension. It’s a haunted swimming pool; do I need to draw you a road map?
As enjoyably moronic horror premises go, “haunted swimming pool” is admittedly a pretty good one, sitting comfortably alongside “beach that makes you old” and “bed that eats people.” But this sort of film needs to lean into its nuttiness to achieve true guilty pleasure status, and Night Swim spends much of its running time frustratingly inert. It takes forever for the pool to start working its wiles on the Wallers, and when it does its invention rarely ventures beyond “sinister toy boat” or “unexplained dark figure.” Even a set piece involving a game of Marco Polo, which one has to imagine was a large part of the impetus to make the movie in the first place, feels strangely anticlimactic (it also strains credulity; teen daughter Izzy’s eyes remain shut even after being grabbed by an unknown presence, which is an extraordinary level of commitment to the rules of Marco Polo). In order for Night Swim to work it needs to go for the cannonball; instead, it barely dips its toes in.
Part of the problem lies at the most basic level: the pool itself simply is not scary. I don’t mean that swimming pools in general lack potential for fright; there have been plenty of great poolside sequences in horror, from Cat People to It Follows. But the pools in both of those films are liminal spaces which capture the eeriness of being adrift in the deep end. The pool in Night Swim, by contrast, is remarkably unremarkable. It is a plain white rectangle set in the backyard, with no distinguishing attributes apart from a diving board and one end slightly deeper than the other. A great horror location needs a visual hook, something just unusual enough to become menacing in shorthand: think the Amityville windows, or the Overlook carpet. I don’t think I could pick the Night Swim pool out of a lineup, and I just spent an entire movie staring at it.
To be sure, there are moments when Night Swim achieves an enjoyable sort of doofy lunacy. Jodi Long briefly hijacks the film as a wild-eyed local with a connection to the pool, injecting the proceedings with a burst of madness which wouldn’t feel out of place in something like Malignant (a January horror film in spirit, even if it was technically released in August). The design of the pool-dwelling ghosts, when we get a good look at them, are appropriately grotesque, waterlogged ghouls worthy of a lesser Sam Raimi effort. And Russell has quietly become one of our most reliable nutball actors, here once again playing the same sort of deranged perversion of the Norman Rockwell everyman he embodied in Under the Banner of Heaven and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. With the right script and a game director, I can see him one day sinking his teeth into a role that will land him in the pantheon of horror.
Not this one, though. There are plenty of worse horror films than Night Swim, but really, that’s the problem. Great January horror films– your M3gans, your The Boys– set themselves apart by giving themselves over to mindless, kooky delirium. Night Swim is too staid to lapse into that sort of lowbrow insanity, but it’s nowhere near artful enough to compete with the “elevated” horror movies of the day (a comparison it seemingly invites by inexplicably setting a little league game to a discordant piece by Hereditary composer Colin Stetson). Night Swim is saddled with a PG-13 rating which prevents it from getting too gnarly, and it lacks the energy or inspiration to compensate. Though it really ought to plunge into the deep end, Night Swim barely gets its trunks wet.
Night Swim
2024
dir. Bryce McGuire
98 min.
Opens Friday, 1/5 in theaters everywhere (though the Hassle recommends Apple Cinemas or your locally owned multiplex)
