Night Swim
Night Swim
As if plunging into a lazy river of horrors was not enough, completing the experience is ‘Night Swim’ – the excuse your friends give every January to convince you to watch a horror movie with them produced by Blumhouse.
“Night Swim” keeps the nets like ‘M3gan’ one calendar year ago. And while I do not believe there will ever be a film that will surpass the gonzo mania or cultural relevance of that film, it does seem that everyone knows the incredibly goofy premise they have all agreed to here, which is a pool… that, um, eats people.
Producers Jason Blum and James Wan seem to possess that rare ability of knowing just how to scare the audience while being very funny. We’ve seen inanimate objects which were characters before like “Rubber” and “in fabric” the cursed dress. But a swimming pool just sounds so enticing, so luxurious that to think it will devour the very people who want to encase themselves in its warmth is simply a brilliant twist.
The good thing is that the pool in question is boring with a cartoonish aggressiveness. This is no dated, kidney shaped waterhole. Neither is it a contemporary drain with a built-in slide, a swim-up bar and a cave.
This is an actual pool like a rectangular hole filled with concrete, the type of pool occuping most kids in the southern California summers of the 70s and 1960s.
Writer-director Bryce McGuire, in a bid to broaden the short he made with Rod Blackhurst into his first feature length film, plays alluding to a primitive and perpetual evil somewhere underneath the banal suburbia. That is hardly a new concept; think Stephen King and David Lynch. And yet, Mcguire manages enough tension off the bat and exploits sound and camera angles to instill an abiding, jarring atmosphere.
A long portion covered in water is a flash back to 1992 and shows a young girl around the age of tween with pigtails, of a crescent shape slamming down to quite the pool only to be in darkness once again. Next, a family is about to move into that very same house and a pool which looks old and crumbles due to years of water exposure.
It is evidently onscreen action that puts Mcguire in a fix: in the earlier scenes, the story incorporates some shocking unreasonable perspectives and reflections; for example, the clear blue sky and the white clouds bathing on a pool cover filled with dried leaves. What may look good in fact, he seems to be arguing is that, it is a false hope.
The uninterrupted bubbling and snorting of the filter and the noise of a diving board hint that the hazards are far from over.
The Waller family is apprehensive at first with regards mouthing the cleanup revolution, but they too seem encouraged by the stability and peace that they want this house outside the twin cities to bring. Ray Waller (Wyatt Russell) has been a superstar baseball player but multiple sclerosis has made him to hang his boots after a lifetime of being a sport that he loves.
His wife, Eve (Kerry Condon), an Oscar nominee for her performance in The Banshees of Inisherin, is not dissimilar; she cannot wait to put down roots after years of being uprooted in order to work. The teenage of the family, Izzy, opens up emotionally and realizes the importance of ‘playing it cool,’ but the same cannot be said for Elliot, the younger, weedy brother who invites pity more than anything.
The pool promises every one something: a place for members to recuperate, entertain themselves from the sun, engage with their peers and repose underneath a starlit sky. More often than not, McGuire employs us with peril through the use unflattering under-water viewpoint but only works for a limited period of time.
But in the end, he ends up overdone with horror clichés such as low-brow use of jump scares, and the routine where someone is watching people inside the pool from above Orwell is only to discover that there’s no one present. Later on in the movie Night Swim, as Maik explains, the pool’s abuse of eerie real estate is far more pleasing than ‘this is what’s happening’ weather.
What mostly brought the house down which made this fairly simple drama into a shocking horror film was the revelation of the real monster which was just too funny, and I would like to believe this was the plan all along. “Night Swim” also has entertaining plot twists that do not involve the protagonist played by Briar B.
Interstingly, Nancy Lenehan played a minicomic role of a real estate agent who sells the house to the family in Minnesota, whilst Ben Sinclair played a quirky pool maintenance worker. And clearly Russell understands what is the current madness as clearly seen from a few of his lines, innocent in tone yet earnest given the fraying realities surrounding them. It’s almost as if he is inviting us: Come on, the waters warm.
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- Genre: Fantasy, horror, Thriller
- Country: United States
- Director: Bryce McGuire
- Cast: Wyatt Russell, Kerry Condon, Amélie Hoeferle
