Night Swim
UNIVERSAL
After two good years of great January cinema, the month has decided the reshuffling was over and reclaimed its throne as the dumping ground of movies with the release of Bryce McGuire’s Night Swim. Based on the terrifyingly effective 2014 short film of the same name (available for free on YouTube), co-directed by McGuire and Rod Blackhurst, the feature-length version sees Ray (Wyatt Russell) and his wife Eve (Kerry Condon) move to a new house where a seemingly ordinary, self-sustaining pool starts to give Ray his life back.
The former pro baseball player was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and, as part of his treatment, needs to spend time in the water. But the pool doesn’t have healing properties – it’s possessed by the spirit(s) of the souls who have drowned in it since its installation. While Ray certainly has improved abilities, it’s not due to the pool or his illness being in remission but to a spirit who latched on to his body while in the swimming pool. The same spirit terrorizes the rest of his family, including his children (Amélie Hoerfele and Gavin Warren), who believe something is wrong with the pool, while his parents – predictably – don’t.
Such a concept isn’t particularly ingenious, but in a month that usually gets filled up with Awards season movies expanding everywhere, it should prove as disposable entertainment to at least be a fun cinema experience for audiences looking to turn their brain off instead of having to think. Night Swim seems to fill that gap of mind-numbing movies that don’t require an ounce of audience participation to figure out what’s what, and it certainly has a couple of excitingly realized sequences that could warrant the trip on the big screen.
In fact, the only redeeming quality the film has going for is its cinematography, with director of photography Charlie Sarroff having fun at creating visual jump scares through the point of view of its protagonists. One such sequence sees a first-person shot of Eve doing laps in the swimming pool, with her head tilting from right to left, calmly swimming at night, with the ambient sounds filling her (swimmer’s) ears, until BOO! – a shadowy figure appears and immediately disappears. It’s predictable, sure, but when it’s done in a remarkably unique way, it must be lauded. Sarroff also has fun during its climax, especially with the flickering light of the pool.
However, that’s about the only time Night Swim felt alive, and it’s also the crux of McGuire’s short film: a woman hears strange noises in her pool, thinks it’s coming from outside, only to get drowned, and never resurfaces. That’s it. It doesn’t try to do too much, and it’s exactly why it works so well. And instead of keeping it simple for the feature film, McGuire and co-scribe Blackhurst scatter its plot to incomprehensibly inane heights with a series of M. Night Shyamalan-esque twists that attempt to feel mind-blowing but are instead so incredibly stupid that it undermines the character arcs as soon as more gets revealed.
Without giving anything away, the introductory situation of the characters seems to be dramatic – and at least interesting enough – for them to fully develop within the movie. However, as the twists arrive, what was initially interesting gets suddenly dropped in a haphazard second and third act full of the worst-ever horror clichés without a single reinvention of tropes. Even the cinematography takes a massive nosedive as thoughtful ideas are introduced yet never explored to their fullest potential. It then becomes a classic possession film in the vein of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist but with the source of all evil in the pool.
The film proceeds to take an irredeemable directorial choice when it uses Ray’s multiple sclerosis not as a character element that makes it difficult for him to live but as a feature that would make it easy for him to get possessed and attempt to kill someone in broad daylight. Treating illness in film is always extremely touchy, and there shouldn’t be a line to cross when depicting ailments beyond the usual cold/flu or even cancer that usually gets depicted in a conventional light, with the usual hair falling and coughing blood.
When it comes to depicting multiple sclerosis, few films have done it right, or at least were respectful enough not to treat it as an object. Andrei Konchalovsky’s Duet for One has one of the most thoughtful depictions of MS put to film, earning Julie Andrews a Golden Globe nomination for her performance. In Night Swim, McGuire doesn’t pay too much mind to Ray’s diagnosis and condition until his muscles stiffen when he is carrying someone on his shoulders, whom he tries to drown during a pool party. The scene is even stupider when audiences realize that he’s not alone in the pool – it’s filled with people who prefer to ignore him instead of directly helping someone in distress.
It’s done in extremely poor taste and completely sinks the latter half of the movie, which teeters on the edge of ridiculous “so-bad-it’s-good” territory with an off-kilter performance from Wyatt Russell, who seems to take inspiration from his father’s machine-possessed Dexter Riley in The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, only for it to get real trite in its final moments, where Ray experiences a “redemption arc” of sorts that doesn’t erase the offensive depictions of MS and stilted performances from Condon, Hoeferle and Warren who are unfortunately saying the most unimaginative lines of their career. It’s especially embarrassing for Condon, who’s fresh off an Oscar-nominated performance in Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin, but this is perhaps the result of the irreparable damage caused by the Academy Award win of Jamie Lee Curtis.
While Night Swim has an intriguing premise, a series of cataclysmically bad decisions completely derails the seemingly noble intentions crafted in the short film for a horror film so inert that only a studio like Blumhouse would ever dare release it. At least they did it in January, where “the dumping ground of movies” finally lives up to its name after many years of films that were too good for this month.