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...
Whoopie, another horror film plucked to the January dumping grounds to start off the new year. Its safe to assume that Blumhouse’s “Night Swim” isn’t going to start another surprise winning streak like last years. And as of right now….
….yeah, it’s shit.
So, what can I say for positives? Ummm……despite what I’ll say later; Bryce McGuire proves adept at living up to Blumhouses low-budget horror expectations and his directing, like or not, is a direct reflection of that. There’s decent sound design, at least from the outside looking in and it had the best runtime it could’ve possibly been awarded; clocking in at 98 minutes, which only works at face value.
Everything else is honestly embarrassing.
Based on a 2014 short film on the same name, the intention was to illustrate how vulnerable we can be within bodies of water as the thought of being stuck in the deep end of a pool, or caught in the ocean tide, combining our fear of drowning and the unknown is rightfully terrifying. It’s not a premise that’s completely rich or foolproof but restricting the plot to the pool itself already makes the vast majority of what happens unbelievable. Yeah, I know, suspension of disbelief has to be taken into account with horror films but I can see myself maybe passing it off if it wasn’t so damn stingy in how restrictive it is. Between the egregious lack of tension, nonsensical puzzle logic in trying to decipher something out of nothing, and so many contradicting rules, you quickly get the sense of how hard the film struggles to restrain itself and that’s one of the worst things a horror film can do.
Making for a very tame direct-to-video feel and aesthetic, it quickly finds itself handicapped by the horror formula staples of cheap, repetitive jump scares, limited production design and momentum butchering PG rating. And it also reverts back to one of my least favorite tropes in horror movies: stupid characters making dumbass decisions to drive the plot forward. Although in my defense, none of these characters will be remembered regardless and very few of the actors catch on to what type of film they’re in. The kids do ok with what they’re given but Wyatt and Kerry basically sleepwalk through it all with ludicrous dialogue delivery on all fronts.
I understand this is yet another one of those short-ranged ideas they had to stretch out to oblivion to pad out the runtime but doing that only pulled the pool cover back on what a truncated, poorly planned out staging this was for the entire films presentation. And to think, this story being built around the idea of sacrifice, that nothing good happens for free because that’s how nature is IS something McGuire could've done more with…..but there are only so many times you can disguise how little something happens while you wait for the disconcerting smoke and mirrors drop. Going for the jugular and providing an unhinged, bonkers experience was probably the better move here, especially since it never does effectively exploit those primal fears around water.
The lack of consistency with either an absurdly silly or distressing tone horribly exposes Bryce McGuires misguided directional handling, as he’s nowhere clever or gusty enough to manipulate the preconceived expectations this film set up or at least have fun with them to great effect. He has vast snippets of potential in sparse doses but he still has a lot of wrinkles to iron out.
Unlike his work in Smile, the majority of Charlie Sarroff’s cinematography is more pedestrian and on the drab side outside of a few well-utilized angles, and the editing is very clunky. Special effects, whenever used, are nothing to write home about, I can remember only THREE distinct notes from the otherwise bland musical score and my god, do I hate the pacing here. Again, it’s only 98 minutes which is plenty of time to accomplish everything it sets out to do but BUGGER ME, does it make treading that narrative water feel THAT MUCH slower!
Do me and the rest of us a favor: watch the short on YouTube and just save yourself an hour and a half. It’s only the beginning of the year; you’re really not missing anything.
