What a stunningly dull excuse for a horror film. NIGHT SWIM, based on a short film of the same name, demonstrates that not every promising short can successfully be expanded into a feature-length opus by the original filmmakers. It’s so narratively lackadaisical that whatever premise held the promise of more-is-better is completely lost. What we are left with is a backyard swimming pool in suburbia that is haunted. It’s also dangerous, though beyond the flashback to 1992, it doesn’t do much more than scare the bejeezus out of the two new kids in town, (though not us) until the requisite reckoning at the end. Even that is so derivative as to be risible.
The kids are Elliot (Gavin Warren) and older sister, Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle). He’s a nerdy kid who worships his ex-ball player father (Wyatt Russell), and she’s a sports whiz who can’t stop rubbing it in to her hapless sibling about being better than he is. They and mom, Eve (Kerry Condon), are going through a major life change with Dad suffering the early effects of MS, and Mom trying to put the best face on it. They are in the market for a new house and a new city, but instead of the accessible town house with call buttons, Dad prefers a house he spots while driving through the area. They don’t suspect anything is amiss when the asking price is ridiculously low for the spacious home, and later they believe their chirpy real estate agent (Nancy Lenehan), when she says she didn’t know that a little girl had drowned there a few decades back. That would be the prologue which involves a toy boat and bunny slippers. It’s about as creepy as it sounds.
Here in the present, Dad is amazing his doctor (Rahnuma Panthaky) with the improvement in his condition after swimming twice a day in the pool. Still, something just ain’t right, with the kids seeing something strange in the deep end of that pool, and that vision of a return to the big leagues that Dad had when he tumbled in while on the first visit.
What should have been a slow boil of increasing uncertainty and suspense is, instead, a long slow slog where nothing happens beyond some exposition as tedious as the rest of the proceedings. Kids go into the deep end when they’ve been told not to, with predictable results, they have a private swim party while Mom and Dad are out one evening, with predictable results, and a neighborhood pool party proceeds with predictable results. The supernatural elements are held at bay to such an extent that they doze off in the holding pen before being rudely awakened by the confession of a felony to Mom by a total stranger.
As for making water, in or out of the pool ominous, the only thing ooky is the sludge that keeps bubbling up from the spring-fed swimming pool. The insistent close-ups of an indoor fountain overflowing conjure up only the expense that cleaning up the water damage will incur. As for the elderly woman who keeps pouring water into her glass until it overflows, the primal reaction is to reach for some paper towels, not a holy relic and/or an exorcist.
Kudos to the actors for their commitment to taking it all seriously. They make the most of insipid dialogue. If Russell is muted as the ex-jock who can’t give up the dream, Condon as his wife brings a fierce devotion to the harried matriarch, and Warren as Elliot has an appealing poignance.
And now the inevitable swimming reference. NIGHT SWIM goes belly up early on and remains a bloated mass that not even the histrionics of a late third act can resuscitate. Rife with hoary tropes rendered with little imagination, its dullness is matched only by its lack of originality.
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