Night Swim (2024) should not be paid for
If you would have told me that the movie about a swimming pool that eats people would be boring, I probably would have believed you. I still would have watched it because I love a high concept silly premise and enjoy horror enough to devour any weird flick that makes it to theaters. Night Swim does no favors to the cast, crew, or even the B movie premise and might as well have been about a toilet.
Looking for a home after a diagnosis that ends his baseball career, Ray Waller moves his family into a house with a cool pool out back. The Wallers love their new home and start to put down roots, but it turns out the spring that fills with pool is full of evil that promises greatness if only it has a sacrifice. Cue possessions and pain that can only come from the idea "what if the Amityville Horror house had a pool?"
The cast here is fine. Somebody needs to get Wyatt Russell a better agent because he is better than most things he has been a part of. Kerry Condon plays his wife Eve damn well, and I loved her in The Banshees of Inisherin last year. Round out the cast with an angsty teen girl (Hoeferle) who wants a boyfriend and a wide-eyed kid (Warren) who wants to live until his 12th birthday, and this family is believable as a unit. Any other drama and these four would have killed it. Every other supporting role is enjoyable and fun yet the product they find themselves in is not at all.
The problem seems to come with tone. This should have been a horror comedy the way the cast plays it at times. There's menace here, especially when the evil begins to take hold, yet instead of The Shining we get Days of Our Lives. When Jack Torrence says "gimme the bat" to Wendy on the stairs, we feel like he's toying with her. When Ray tells his daughter "Baby, we already got help" as the pool is eating her brother, it's just silly. And that's okay, but it feels like what we are supposed to feel (dread) is being superseded by what we are seeing (wackiness).
The background of family trouble and the pool lies at the center of the tonal problem. I cared for the family (due to the acting, see above) and wanted them to be challenged. Yet rather than follow the drama, the plot about the evil pool needed to be adhered to so we get a wacky pool guy and a ditzy real estate agent leading to a confrontation that falls flat because that idea is the afterthought. Sure, the family drama ties into evil with dad's illness being slowly cured by the water. He wants something and will sacrifice to get it, but only because the water makes him. But evil water does not a good villain make. By the time we get the full reveal, it's too late. The monster is just the water. The family do not bind themselves together after being divided to triumph. They just make it out because the movie was about to be over, and it ran out of story.
I did not hate this movie. It was disappointing. Wait for this one to hit streaming if you want to see it, but save your theater cash for something more fun or dramatic or just interesting.