Night Swim: Something Wicked This Way Swims… and Quickly Sinks
By Thom Ernst
Rating: C-
No doubt foul things are lurking at the bottom of neglected swimming pools waiting to surface, but few will be as bad as what director Bryce McGuire dredges up in Night Swim, with its disappointingly dry take on the there’s-something-in-the-water premise.
The water here fills a backyard swimming pool fed by an underground spring. Wyatt Russell plays Ray Waller, a former pro baseball player on an indefinite hiatus due to a severe injury. Waller relocates his family to get much-needed rest while his wife Eve (Kerry Condon) returns to teaching at a nearby middle school.
Moments before settling on a rental house that is “good enough,” the Wallers happen upon their dream home. And it’s for sale. Buying a house signals to Eve Waller that Ray is ready to give up professional baseball and focus on being a family man.
The house proves to be even better than its curb appeal. It’s large enough for the family of four — Ray, Eve, and their two children, Izzy (Amélie Hoeferie) and Elliot (Gavin Warren). It also comes at a ridiculously reasonable price tag and has a backyard pool. Things are looking up for the Wallers, except for the family cat, who goes missing the first night in.
Soon after the family moves in and the cat mysteriously disappears, the Wallers realize the pool has miraculous healing powers. Within a day, Waller is back to breaking stadium lights with out-of-the-park homerun hits, and the emotional strain the family has been enduring has lifted. Granted, there is the issue of Ray falling into a trance and attempting to drown the neighbourhood kids, but you learn to take the good with the bad.
Not long into the film, it’s apparent that the sink-or-swim undertaking of the filmmakers will sink. Dragging the film down is a litany of character types, from Condon’s wise and saintly wife and mother routine (her every interaction with her teen daughter is met with wide-eyed appreciation) to the comically awkward pool technician (Ben Sinclair) to the obsequious pandering of the real estate agent (Nancy Lenehan).
But it’s disingenuous to suggest the characters are to blame when the film’s writing anchors Night Swim down to its rock bottom. A collusion of myth, psychedelic imagery, and made-for-television horror makes for an uneven delivery, even from the film’s best performances.
McGuire has made an underachieving thriller, a film so diluted in formulaic premise and character types that it loses any opportunity to shock or surprise. Not even Michael Korven’s soundtrack can tease audiences into a respectable sense of foreboding.
Night Swim is another title to add to the increasingly unreliable canon of films from Jason Blum and James Wan. Not every new project has to be greenlit, gentlemen.
Night Swim. Directed by Bryce McGuire. Starring Wyatt Russell, Kerry Condon, Amélie Hoeferie, Gavin Warren, Ben Sinclair, and Nancy Lenehan. In select theatres now.