Don't run to see "Night Swim"

Night Swim (2024)

Blumhouse’s modest-budget model has proven to be effective time and time again, but not every idea can be a winner. A haunted swimming pool is a solid start for a high-concept horror feature that started as a 2014 short film from Rod Blackhurst and Bryce McGuire. What makes this expansion all the more disappointing is that it’s McGuire’s feature writing-directing debut. The water is not so fine, and neither is “Night Swim.”

Whereas the three-odd-minute short involved a young woman (Megalyn Echikunwoke) taking an actual night swim in her own pool, here we have the Waller family moving into a new house, complete with an in-ground swimming pool that comes with a past. It’s great physical therapy for husband and father Ray (Wyatt Russell), a former major league baseball player who’s forced into early retirement by a degenerative illness. To the surprise of both his wife, Eve (Kerry Condon), and his doctor, Ray’s health dramatically improves, and the kids, teenage daughter Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle) and younger son Elliot (Gavin Warren), love the pool! But before you can say, “Get out of the water!” and “Don’t stick your hand in there!” or give any other direction to the screen, there is something definitely wrong with that pool.

Being a swimmer myself, the water has still always come with an irrational fear of the unknown below. Writer-director McGuire certainly gets some mileage out of those fears lurking in the deep end. Right off the top in a 1992-set prologue, the filmmaker clearly pays homage to “Jaws” with a drowning. Shots from a swimmer’s point-of-view, breathing between each stroke, are effective, as are a few moments where the camera is half-surface and half-underwater, and a nightly game of Marco Polo between daughter Izzy and her crush nicely builds some apprehension. Mostly, though, the film falls short in how it fills out the rest of its runtime as an inferior rehash of a certain 1979 haunted-house oldie (just add a scary pool!). Read the full review at GuyAtTheMovies.com

Grade: C

Universal Pictures released "Night Swim" (98 min.) in theaters on January 5, 2023.