Written by Margaret Rasberry January 4th, 2024
Every release from Blumhouse should be approached with trepidation. The studio can produce genuine surprises such as the oscar winning Get Out, the wackiness of M3gan, the pulsating Whiplash, and the genuine chills of Cam, but as Blumhouse releases an average of 5-8 horror films a year, the desperation to keep releasing cheaply made horror films from burgeoning filmmakers culminates in releasing quite a few debacles in the past year, with Night Swim continuing the woefully pitiful trend.
Adapted from a mediocre three minute short film that is a blatant rip off of the original opening of Jaws, Night Swim stretches the thin premise of a monster swimming pool even further by recentering the film not on a distressed young woman but a suburban family moving into a new home in the suburbs. The patriarch Ray Waller (Wyatt Russel) is a former baseball player, whose career has fallen down the drain as a result of a diagnosis of Multiple sclerosis, and is left feeling emasculated as his wife Eve (Kerry Condon) becomes the sole breadwinner of the family, while his teenage children Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle) and Elliot (Gavin Warren) find themselves assimilating into the new neighborhood, and with a seemingly wonderful pool too! Ray finds himself becoming distant from his weakly son Elliot as the pool is revealed to have healing properties, with his MS symptoms waning over the course of the film, while Izzie is courted by a crush to join the swim team, and Eve finds pleasure in the pool as she was a former navy brat who learned how to swim in a pool early in life.
Did I bring up the pool a bit too much, like it was clumsily forced in? I am just imitating how the film inserts pool references as subtle as a baseball bat to the face. The issue with Bryce McGuire’s handling of adapting his short film into a feature length film is that the connective tissue of the subplots added to the film need to carry resonance with the viewer. While watching the film, I was struck by the clarity of how disinterested McGuire was about the family at the emotional core and lazily ties together family dynamics that is disinteresting to watch, resulting in confused actors trying their best to deliver a fine performance on an uninspired premise. By the third act, I was becoming aware that McGuire began to realize this and wrote in quippy dialogue and tried infusing his film with slapstick to evoke the recent similar narrative structure of such features as M3gan and Malignant but the film treats the material so deathly serious that by the moment bathos is permitted that the viewer is adrift as what they are supposed to feel. The audience I watched it with gave desperate giggles, trying to evoke any sense of enjoyment in the final act that it became disarmingly lamentable.
Kerry Condon deserves so much better as she is the shining outlet of this whole dreadfully tiresome affair, trying with all her immense talent to save this picture to no avail. Horror films are a remarkable source of originality and engaging narratives, but we are saddled with shallow premises that waste remarkable talent in a genre that is ripe for genuine emotional impact, with Blumhouse’s last two features at least having the reasoning being adapted from two intellectual properties with creators who could not fathom developing a film that lived up to expectations, Night Swim falls beneath the watery depths of low expectations for original horror films.
Grade: D
Blumhouse Productions will release Night Swim Friday January 5th, 2023 in theaters.
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