Night Swim is a horror movie following a family moving into a new home and discovering their new pool has mystic yet sinister abilities. Starring Wyatt Russell and Kerry Condon, Night Swim is a very formulaic Blumhouse horror that lacks any real scares and any interesting story beats.
I have a love-hate relationship with Blumhouse. Sometimes they put out some fantastic, fun horror movies that resonate with me. Other times they put out movies like this where there is no life or charm to speak of and the story isn’t interesting enough to carry any sort of runtime. This falls into the latter.
The best part of this movie is that it got Kerry Condon after she was snubbed for her Oscar last year. She was a good lead character to serve as our surrogate. Wyatt Russell is also pretty good but those two gave this movie some star power it did not deserve.Â
The plot is very simple. The pool water is essentially the monkey’s paw, where once it’s awoken, it will grant the user what it wants at the price of a sacrifice. It’s an interesting enough idea but the movie ruins it by turning it into a possession story. The pool now has ghosts in it that just grab at people until the end. If they treated it more like the monkey paw instead of a possessed pool, I think the movie would’ve been more interesting.
The ghost designs were pretty bad, in all honesty. They all looked very bland and indistinguishable dark figures. There are a lot of scenes done underwater so I can see that limiting what they can create, but it was just very bland. Talk To Me had ghosts appear wet as if they had died drowning and they looked creepier than anything here, which is discouraging knowing that this movie had 3x the budget.
Speaking of bland, the scares in this movie fall incredibly flat. There is only one scene towards the end that remotely creeped me out. Everything else was typical Blumhouse-style jumpscares, served on a silver platter after hearing the dinner bell ring. A character would look one way, see nothing, look the other, and when they looked back, Boo scary ghost! There’s nothing worse than a movie forcing their scares rather than building them up organically.
There are a ton of people who have water-based fears. I, for one, get uncomfortable swimming in a pool alone. They could’ve played into that just like movies like The Descent use claustrophobia as a way to generate unease well before the evil entities are even introduced. It’s a big missed opportunity in my eyes.
FINAL THOUGHTS
I didn’t have any expectations of this movie being good. The premise was kind of fun the first time I saw the trailer and it was then tired by the time I saw it a second time. Wyatt Russell and Kerry Condon cash a check here and we get an uninspired horror movie to kick off the new year.
