I Just Saw

Well, I saw my first movie of 2024, Night Swim, and it was a dud, though not at least a painful one. It was a typical January horror film, though of the mediocre school as opposed to outright schlock. It tells a Stephen King-esque tale of a haunted swimming pool in the new backyard of Ray (Wyatt Russell) and Eve Waller (Kerry Condon) and their two children. Ray is an ex-baseball star whose career has been stopped short by ME, so when the pool seems to rejuvenate his ailing muscles he’s delighted. But it also has a nasty habit of luring moggies to their doom and violently interrupting midnight games of Marco Polo.

I described this as a King-style plot because his career started out with a lot of stories about everyday objects – hotel rooms, cars, laundry machines – taking on supernatural malevolence. Night Swim feels in its premise and basic familial setup like a story from his first collection, Night Shift. But director/co-writer Bryce McGuire, assisted with the screenplay by Rod Blackhurst, just doesn’t give it the oomph that it needed to reach King’s level.

There are roughly two ways to tell a story about a haunted swimming pool. The first is as campy schock, like an ‘80s movie where the filter comes alive and sucks someone’s insides out through their trunks, while others crack their heads open running by the pool. (DESPITE the warnings!) Maybe a lifeguard gets garrotted by his own whistle.

The second is as a more subtextual ghost story. The pool and its rejuvenation abilities are a metaphor for the father’s ambition as well as his thwarted athleticism. Beneath his humble facade is an egotist who resents his wife and children, almost blaming them for his ailment. He prizes his nightly swim above all else, and forges a parasocial bond with the pool, not caring when it almost kills another swimmer…

Night Swim’s tone is too dour for the former approach and its characters too thin for the latter. Though sold with a 15 certificate here, it’s clearly been workshopped to fit a PG-13 in the States. It could even have passed as a 12A here, since there’s no sex or foul language and its “strong horror” (to quote the BBFC) is really of the mildest hue.

The basics of a good horror story are there, but it aims firmly at mediocre. I never felt as though the pool really had a mind of its own, or was cursed or whatever. An issue which wasn’t helped by characters making stupid choices like when one crawls across the diving board to pull an inflatable near. A standard January horror.

Rating: 2/4