Sometime last year, an upcoming union was announced that had the potential to shake the horror genre to the very core of its foundations. On one side was Jason Blum’s social commentary factory, Blumhouse, an absurdly prolific movie studio that’s given us everything from Get Out to an entire Halloween trilogy – the other is the James Wan owned Robot Monster and the last time these two minder minds put their heads together, we got Insidious, Wan’s first, proper breakout hit since his debut, Saw.
The first result of this collaboration is Night Swim, an expansion of a short film by filmmaker Bryce McGuire who aims to show us that there’s far more prevalent dangers involving your average swimming pool than iffy PH levels or someone recklessly performing a cannonball. But does the results of Blumhouse and Robot Monster taking the plunge give us a movie that sinks or swims?
The Waller family are having to endure some tough times after former baseball player Ray is slowly succumbing to a degenerating illness that’s attacking his central nervous system. As a result, the family are shopping for a new house while he struggles with his new life and after finding a house in their price range, an added bonus is that the residence comes with a swimming pool. Supportive wife Eve, teenage daughter Izzy and young son Elliot all pitch in to get the pool cleaned up and ready to go to aid Ray with his hydrotherapy, but after clearing out the mulch and dead leaves, they find out that their new pool is actually self sustaining as it takes its water supply and filtration from a local underground spring.
Of course, thanks to a handy, 1992-set, pre-credits prologue, we’ve already established that the pool – or at the very least, the water inside it – is as evil as all get out as it claimed a little child by luring her in, Pennywise style, with a little red motor boat.
At the Wallers get more and acquainted with their cursed pool, it has either one of two very separate effects on them. Eve, Izzy and Elliot all have extraordinarily disturbing encounters while swimming alone with waterlogged ghouls engaging in some watery jump scares while the pool changes its dimensions in alarming ways. However, Ray has an entirely different experience, as the haunted water starts healing his physical issues but at the cost of slowly taking over his mind and turning him against his loved ones.
What would a possessed, killer swimming pool possibly want of Ray and his family and how far will it go when it decides to take payment for the mystery cure it’s bestowed on the sickly patriarch?
Before I drown you all in one too many watery puns (dammit!), I have to say that the debut from this much touted producing team of Blum and Wan proves to be something of a damp squib as Night Swim proves to be a samey, repetitive and fairly predictable frightener proves to play it so safe, it teeters on boring. If the battle plan of the two horror heavyweights is to pluck the next genre legend out of obscurity by allowing them to build upon their preexisting short films that brought them to the attention to the producers in the first place, then good luck to them. However, not every short film can keep their ideas and scares intact once blown up and built upon into becoming a full blown feature film. While I haven’t seen McGuire’s 2014 short that Night Swim takes its lead from, I’m sure it’s an incredibly eerie experience, but stretched out to a still rather threadbare 98 minutes, the concept of a killer swimming pool tends to flounder when coming up with anything new.
Borrowing liberally from various versions of Poltergeist and The Amityville Horror, the experience of the Wallers isn’t that far removed from that experienced by the Freelings and Lutzs and a good point could be made that the entire plot of Night Swim is just the memorable swimming pool sequence from Tobe Hooper’s legendary haunted house flick merely stretched out to feature length.
This wouldn’t be much of a problem if Night Swim could have been a little more varied with its scarier scenes, but while McGuire manages to find some fantastically creepy angles to shoot swimmers with (looking up from the bottom of a pool with the walls on either side just feels so fantastically wrong), as each member of the family get their own little submerged scare, things get noticably samey. I’m reminded of a YouTube comedy sketch where a pool party is disrupted by a shark, but all the frat boys can’t resist from getting back in the pool and partying even though they’re getting eaten and this movie feels a little similar. It’s not like the evil spirit looming up behind them or whispering spectral shit in their ear is in their house and it’s a little tough to be scared by an entity whose evil whims could be easily disrupted by a rainy day or even by simple laziness as all you have to do is simply don’t go in.
Matters finally manage to switch things up after Wyatt Russell’s lead gets mind controled and goes off the deep end – so to speak, but up until then the movie goes through no less than five or six iterations of the exact same scenario of someome entering the pool and having some variation of a similar, drawn out scare sequence occur. While the performances by the likes of Russell and Kerry Condon are generally strong, the overall result proves to be the difference of doing repetitive laps in a plain, generic pool and having the time of your life at a hold-no-barred water park with flumes and rubber rings and shit and sadly Night Swim is more of the former. Despite often falling into the trap of over using its gimmick at the drop of the hat Night Swim isn’t a poorly constructed movie – it’s deeply unoriginal one that only truly comes to life when the plot takes weird swings with a much-needed detour into the spring’s past that involves much revelations and sinister murky liquid seeping from orrifices.
Still, despite the fact that Night Swim doggy paddles past the finishing line, it’s only the first entry out of the gate of this horror team-up for the ages – it’s just if James Wan and Jason Blum wants to take advantage of merging their respective visions, they’re going to have to produce something far more buoyant than this.
Everybody out of the pool…
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