The same day The Exorcist: Believer was released in theaters, the trailer for Night Swim teased a spine-tingling return to basics for Blumhouse Productions. Rather than rebooting a horror classic or giving us another monster like M3GAN, it tapped into a more primal fear — the idea of a swimming pool turning into a hellish abyss.
As the pool opens up beneath teenage Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle) and the pitch-black water swallows her, the trailer conjures up the endless list of nightmarish scenarios we’ve all likely imagined when swimming. That’s what makes the concept so terrifyingly tantalizing: In a pool, anything is possible. (Thanks to Jaws, we worry about sharks even in suburban water parks.)
Unfortunately, even after expanding the 2014 short film he directed with Rod Blackhurst, director / co-writer Bryce McGuire doesn’t dive deep into the potential of pool horror. While Night Swim explores some intriguing ideas and delivers a few scares, it barely skims the surface of its promising premise.
The film follows the Waller family as they seek a new home in the wake of Ray (Wyatt Russell, Kurt’s son) being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and retiring from major-league baseball. His wife, Eve (Kerry Condon), wants to set down roots now that they don’t have to worry about moving whenever he’s traded to a new team. Plus, they both want to give their kids, Izzy and Elliot (Gavin Warren), a sense of stability. So, they settle down in the suburbs, embracing the big house with the backyard pool they’ve always wanted.
The film shows promise early on as it examines the idea of pools in surprisingly thoughtful ways. Ray reflects on his childhood days of going to the public pool with his friends and pretending they were rich kids in a backyard oasis. Eve talks about her father tossing her in the training tank at his naval base. And a pool technician waxes philosophical about our reptilian instinct to return to the water even after we’ve evolved beyond it.
Once Ray starts hitting the pool for water therapy, it proves to have extraordinary healing powers, surprising even his doctor. Here’s where the film has a chance to go off the deep end into hard-R Cocoon territory. Disappointingly, it stays in the shallows.
Ray is all too reserved about the pool’s magical nature. When the water seems to close up his hand wound after a day or two, he barely cracks a smile. So why should we tremble with excitement? Why not go all out and make him as obsessed with the magic amid the mundane as Richard Dreyfuss’s character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind? The film already has a Poltergeist vibe, so why not fill the pool with Spielbergian spectacles?
A neighborhood pool party sequence seems ripe for big scares — pool noodle strangulation, a flood, creatures coming out of the drains! Sadly, it gives us none of those things. However, the film does include some of the subtler horrors of a pool — the flickering of underwater lights, the gurgling sound of a drain, the distortion of outside sights from beneath the surface. That’s all great stuff for a short film on YouTube, but it’s not worthy of a big-screen experience.
The film also delves into past tragedies tied to the pool and explains them via a stereotypically mystical Asian character. (This is where it evokes sci-fi / horror movies from the 1970s and ’80s in a cringy way.) If it did this in a tongue-in-cheek manner, that’d be fine, but McGuire seems to want us to take this seriously, which is especially evident in the understated performances.
I’m a little tired of “serious horror.” Most of us fall in love with horror as curious kids, and this film taps into those childhood memories. In the pool, our imaginations run wild. If only this film swam against the current by not trying to rise to the level of “elevated horror” and having fun in the deep end instead.