It’s long been an extreme palate cleanser, the first weekend of January following a season of weighty awards fare with a froth of schlock horror, from fine dining to a guilty stop at McDonald’s after. Masterworks such as The Devil Inside (6%), Texas Chainsaw 3D (19%), The Forest (10%) and The Unborn (10%) have all crept out of the gate in previous years, often unscreened for critics, and despite a consistent lack of quality, the practice has become profitable, audiences happy to see in the new year with the very worst the industry has to offer. Then last year, there was an unlikely win with sly evil doll horror M3gan, bucking the trend as not only a major commercial smash but also a critical one, and backers, horror hit-factory Blumhouse, duly rushed another on to the production line, primed for that once-cursed January release.
Yet Night Swim, a film about an evil swimming pool, is no M3gan and while not as atrocious as these first week frighteners can often be, it’s akin to a cold splash of water in the face, an immediate return to the ho-hum norm of before. It’s the sort of bottom-shelf concept that feels more at home in the 80s, alongside Blood Beach, Death Bed and Killer Workout and there’s not not some trashy fun to be squeezed out of such a lurid premise. Yet unlike those films, it’s accompanied by an uncomfortably stony face, silliness taken with far more seriousness than it deserves, quickly sinking the whole thing further by the minute.
It makes for an odd cheque-casher for Kerry Condon, riding high off her breakout Oscar nomination for The Banshees of Inisherin, lumped with a thankless role that offers wide-release screentime but very little else. She plays a woman struggling to understand why her new pool is wreaking so much havoc on her family’s new life. Her husband, played by Wyatt Russell, is a one-time baseball player struggling with early MS and while the water therapy initially improves his condition, he quickly turns into Jack Torrance, obsessed with pool and willing to do whatever pool wants even if pool bad.
But why is pool bad? What does pool want? How does pool kill? They’re questions that lead to unintentionally amusing scenes (Russell energised to hit a home run when he thinks of pool, a glass smashing itself because it’s possessed by water from pool) and some equally daft exchanges (“There’s something wrong with this pool!” “That pool is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me!”) but as writer-director Bryce McGuire starts pouring in elements of both The Shining and The Ring, leaks start to appear. The more we learn about pool, the more absurd it all gets, highlighted in one of the most unconvincing and junkily acted exposition scenes I can remember in a horror film. The scrambled together backstory, worked back from the words “what if pool but evil”, starts to make sense when you learn the backstory of the film itself, based on a simple one-scene 2014 short.
Rather than reminding us of a hokey B-movie from the 80s, it ends up being more reminiscent of one of the many failed J-horror remakes of the 00s, like One Missed Call or Pulse or Shutter, a series of ineffective stops and starts drowning in imagery that intends to haunt but fails to stick around for long enough. The essential problem with Night Swim is that no matter how McGuire might try (and credit to his ability as director, he really does put in the effort), the pool is never the terrifying setting it needs to be and the elements that prevent the family from leaving the house or just not getting into the damn pool become as strained as our interest. The rushed last act, with rules that are invented from scene to scene, is tiresomely incoherent, crescendoing with a ludicrous emotional play, imagining an investment in ciphers we simply don’t have (Condon and Russell are just about adequate but there’s not enough here for them to go from shallow to deep end).
A lighter touch? A nastier rating? A sense of humour? Something is missing from Night Swim, nothing up on screen to insist this as anything else but more-of-the-same first week filler. Pool empty.
Night Swim is out in US, UK and Australian cinemas on 5 January
