NIGHT SWIM (2024)

Studio: Universal/Blumhouse
Director: Bryce McGuire
Writer: Bryce McGuire, Rod Blackhurst
Producer: Jason Blum, James Wan
Stars: Wyatt Russell, Kerry Condon, Amelie Hoeferle, Gavin Warren, Jodi Long, Nancy Lenehan, Eddie Martinez, Ben Sinclair

Review Score:

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Summary:

A haunted swimming pool presents a family with a supernatural way to heal their ailing father, but only if a dark sacrifice is made first.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

In 1992, a supernatural force pulls young Rebecca Summers into her family's backyard swimming pool when she tries to retrieve a toy boat for her bedridden brother Tommy. While submerged, Rebecca sees a vision of her mother above the water's surface. Rebecca mysteriously vanishes and is eventually presumed dead.

Decades later, Ray Waller, a professional baseball player sidelined by a debilitating multiple sclerosis diagnosis, moves into the former Summers home with his wife Eve, their teenage daughter Izzy, and their younger son Elliot. While cleaning the pool's drain, Ray suffers a deep gash on his hand. A pool tech investigating the drain informs the family that their pool is actually tapped directly into local groundwater.

Eve sees a strange vision of Ray while submerged during a late-night solo swim. The family's cat Cider also disappears in the pool when no one is watching.

After repeated uses of the pool for physical therapy, Ray notices his hand wound miraculously healed. Ray's doctor also remarks that Ray's condition shows surprising improvement.

While swimming alone, the disembodied voice of Rebecca Summers draws Elliot to the pool's skimmer. Elliot reaches inside to retrieve a lost action figure. A ghoulish hand grabs him.

Elliot tells his mother about his eerie encounter. He also tells Eve that the ghostly girl identified herself as Rebecca Summers and said she was searching for her mother. Ray dismisses Elliot's experience as an imagined event.

At the urging of Elliot's coach, Ray takes a few swings during Little League batting practice. Ray hits a scorching home run so far and so hard that he tears the cover off the ball.

Izzy has Ronin, her crush from the high school swim team, over to the house while Ray and Eve are out. During a game of Marco Polo in the pool, Izzy encounters a ghoulish figure. Afterward, Elliot insists that his sister reveal what she witnessed, but Izzy refuses to admit the pool might be haunted because she doesn't want to risk having to move again.

The family hosts a pool party for new neighbors, Izzy's friends, and Elliot's Little League team. Over conversation, Eve asks her realtor Kay why the previous owners left the pool unused for so long. Kay admits there were rumors that a girl once drowned in it. Eve becomes alarmed after Kay confirms the girl's name was Rebecca Summers.

While playing a pool game with Ty, the son of Elliot's baseball coach, a supernatural cloud emerges from the drain to possess Ray, who subsequently pulls Ty underwater. Ty nearly drowns until he is rescued. Eve has to revive Ray. Ty's parents decline to press charges against Ray for the incident, but warn that Elliot is no longer welcome at practice.

Eve tries to convince Ray that something is wrong with the pool. Ray coldly contends that the pool is the greatest thing that ever happened to him.

Ray has to be confined to his bed after suffering unexplained convulsions and choking. Strangely, Ray still begs his wife to let him swim in the pool one more time.

Eve's research into Rebecca Summers leads her to discover that multiple people have gone missing on the property. Eve tracks down Rebecca's mother, who weirdly denies having a daughter, though she does claim that the pool helped her ill son Tommy heal. In response to Eve's question about the water being bad, Mrs. Summers compares the pool to a wishing well while insisting the water is magic. Mrs. Summers further explains that a natural spring in the ground below the pool gives people their deepest desires. However, the well has its own wish, which is to take a life so it can keep giving its gifts. Mrs. Summers also says the water used her as a vessel, and her daughter was worth the sacrifice to get her son back. Eve tells Mrs. Summers that her daughter is still looking for her, which prompts Mrs. Summers to cough up water, bleed a black substance, and make cryptic taunts about the house in a supernatural state.

The sound of his cat meowing draws Elliot to the pool. Elliot sees a ghoulish figure and falls in. While Eve dives in to rescue her son from the sinister spirits, Izzy races inside to call for help. Undergoing another possession, Ray attacks his daughter and exclaims it is better for him if Elliot dies.

Rebecca's ghost helps orient Eve so she can escape the water with Elliot. Still possessed, Ray stops Eve from reviving their son. Izzy attacks her father from behind with a baseball bat, causing Ray to fall into the pool. With his wife and daughter pleading for him to come back to them, Ray fights off his paranormal infection and returns to normal.

Realizing his son is dying, Ray decides to sacrifice himself. Ray submerges himself in the pool and disappears in a dark cloud. Elliot survives. The family fills in the pool with bulldozed dirt in the aftermath.

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Review:

It wasn't until a recent pool-themed round at Dead Right Horror Trivia that I realized how often pools feature prominently in horror films. Often enough to have a dedicated trivia category, at any rate.

"The Strangers: Prey at Night's" (review here) most memorable moment remains fresh in many minds. "Let the Right One In's" climax probably does, too. But how many fright fans immediately recall what briefly happens to the apartment building's pool in "Poltergeist III," or what Oliver Reed finds at the bottom of a pool that drives him mad in "Burnt Offerings?" Somewhat amusingly, 2018 Thai thriller "The Pool" (review here) didn't even come up in the round.

Next time "pool horror" works its way into trivia, players now have "Night Swim" to take into consideration. The film follows the family of Ray Waller, a professional baseball player sidelined by multiple sclerosis. His new home's old pool provides water therapy that mysteriously puts Ray on a fast track toward miraculous recovery. The trouble for Ray is, people have a bad habit of submerging in the water and disappearing, because the supernatural swimming pool demands sinister sacrifices in return for giving its healing gifts.

The trouble for me is, should a question about "Night Swim" actually appear in trivia, it's bound to be met with an empty stare on my face. That's because the film is such a by-the-Blumhouse-book bore, I'll probably forget every single thing about it by tomorrow, never mind months from now.

When I say "by-the-Blumhouse-book" in this instance, I'm specifically referring to the go-to blueprint for their 'Tier Three' productions. Prestige projects like Jordan Peele joints and major IPs like "Halloween" go in the top tier. The next level down houses medium-range releases such as "Ouija: Origin of Evil" (review here), i.e. movies with some mainstream marketing and more production money than a streaming service collaboration would get to play with. Now that the 'BH Tilt' basement is boarded up for good, the lowest level belongs to Blumhouse's straight-to-streaming titles that immediately evaporate like water on a windshield in the Palm Desert sun. The space right above there is approximately where "Night Swim" fits. Its thrills aren't so throwaway or its look so cheap as to be deemed direct-to-DVD worthy, but the movie's overall oomph factor falls far enough down that a 17-day difference between its theatrical release and digital premiere shouldn't be a shock.

Here's some of what the 'Tier Three' routine generally entails: A compact cast featuring up to two recognizable actors, in this case Wyatt Russell and Kerry Condon, who come with some name value yet don't demand bank-breaking salaries. One primary location, like this film's suburban home with a backyard pool, where 90% of scenes take place so conditions are controllable and equipment is easily accessed. An uncomplicated script that starts off with a scare, e.g. "Night Swim's" prologue flashback that sets up backstory eventually explained by Act Three exposition, then predictably plods through escalating activity whose eeriness always knows to wait until the ending before fully blooming. Finally, everything always packages conveniently into a commercially attractive runtime that rarely spills over 90 minutes.

Following formula isn't automatically a terrible path for a film to pick. Movies, particularly in horror, do this all the time and still see success. Aspiring to be average is entirely acceptable, even desirable, in some circumstances.

So what's the difference between a mediocre thriller that scores three out of five stars, which is enough to lift it out of the red zone, and a mediocre movie like "Night Swim" that only scores two stars or less? The difference is, even with ho-hum horror, I can usually find something worth acknowledging with some measure of tempered admiration. With "Night Swim," I'm not sure I can.

Wyatt Russell and Kerry Condon's performances? Eh, they're fine actors who are ordinarily enjoyable to watch, but they're playing rote roles without doing anything noteworthy here. Suspense? Viewers with a fear of drowning might be conditioned to unconsciously hold their breath during some scenes of submersion, except even those jolts are of the plain hand-on-a-shoulder variety. Production quality? From cinematography to staging, everything meets basic standards, but also, nothing asks for more than minimum effort anyway.

It's a bit unfair to knock careless credits since a film's key creators have nothing to do with those, yet "Night Swim's" text nevertheless suggests not everyone put their best professional feet forward. For instance, the end credit scroll associates Mrs. Summers actress Jodi Long with the character name Kay, except Kay is actually the realtor played by Nancy Lenehan, who doesn't appear in the scroll at all. Lenehan does have her own solo card in the end title sequence, however. Curiously, so does Ben Sinclair, despite playing an unnamed 'Pool Tech' with barely 60 seconds of screen time. Figure out how all of that happened.

I haven't seen the 2014 short that this feature is adapted from, although I've seen enough to conclude this is a case of a film so thin and so bland, it would have been better off remaining at four minutes. Now that the filmmakers have had a taste of the Blumhouse big time, I sincerely hope they have the confidence to be more creatively daring on their next outings. For my sake, I also hope the horror trivia hosts don't test my memory of this mid movie, otherwise I'll be turning in a blank piece of paper.

Review Score: 40

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