Grade: C
I am going to be very wary of any future beginning-of-the-year releases from Blumhouse – but I may keep attending them, in case lightning ever strikes. I blissfully made it almost a whole year without hyperlinking to M3GAN, 2023’s early January offering from Jason Blum’s production company. 2024 begins with Night Swim, from writer/director Bryce McGuire, making his feature film debut. It’s based on a 4 minute short film he did in 2014 – also called Night Swim. It’s on YouTube.
After a mysterious pre-credits death in a haunted backyard pool, we cut to the present day, as the Waller family moves into the same house. Ray Waller (Wyatt Russell) is a former major league baseball player, retired for the time being, and diagnosed with MS. He and his wife Eve (Academy Award nominee Kerry Condon from The Banshees of Inisherin), and children Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle from The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes) and Elliot (Gavin Warren) are excited about their new home and pool. They are about to discover what happens when you go into the deep end.
Night Swim is overflowing with Idiot Plot. One unusual incident at the pool? Sure, chalk that up to a fluke. But when something weird happens to every person in the family, I’d consider staying in the house, and I definitely wouldn’t host a neighborhood pool party. Since it’s PG-13, things don’t get too gnarly. The brief flashes of ghosts in the pool look about as intimidating as anything from Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark 30 years ago. Most jump scares are of the silly, lame variety, like…we’re in a new scene, and it’s just the blender making a smoothie. Or…the pool tech was leaning against the diving board, and slipped a little.
A convoluted backstory of the property is provided to us. It’s not too dissimilar from your standard “This house was built on an ancient Indian burial ground.” When characters become possessed by the pool spirit, they look like they started to transform into the Hulk, but something went wrong. A character-turned-Hulkpool-humanoid utters a three word adage – and later on, another one says the exact same phrase. That’s cute. They read the script. Twinsies. The movie ends with flat emotionless epilogue dialogue that only serves to finish up the story, with no tangible regard for the unpacking of the sheer horror and tragedy that had just come before. So much of Night Swim could have been avoided by common sense. Don’t go into the pool at night, or alone. Stop waiting for your swimming companion to say “Polo.” Just open your eyes, get out of the water, and end the stupid game. Or, I’ve got a 3 word expression for you: we are moving.
Note: in the teaser trailer, we see Izzy, seemingly abandoned in the middle of a two-person game of Marco Polo. (How fun or challenging can that game be with just one Poloer?) After some silence, finally she says “Ronin, you’re [pause] dead.” I figured there was an adverb in there, taken out for the trailer. But no. If you were curious, that’s exactly how the line appears in the film. It is PG-13, after all.
Grade: C
Film Reviews by Mark 
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