From the Stephen King school of what-object-can-we-haunt comes Night Swim, this year’s annual first-weekend-in-January horror movie. Yes, it really is about a family that moves into a new house and encounters a haunted swimming pool. That’s the kind of concept inevitably preceded by “proof of” in someone’s enthusiastic pitch meeting, and sure enough, this 98-minute movie began its life as a short film that, sans credits, runs about as long as a typical trailer.
Still, it’s not as if the short leaves the feature-length Night Swim with no place to go; the original version’s glimpsed specter doesn’t even get in the water! To expand upon this glorified teaser, director and co-writer Bryce McGuire (along with Rod Blackhurst, co-director of the short, who has a story credit here) have concocted a pair of backstories—one for their pool-vexed family, the other for the pool itself.
Further details about the pool story, a loopy bit of mythology that’s like paved-over folk horror, would drift into spoiler territory. The family strife, though more familiar, is surprisingly and pleasingly specific: Ray Waller (Wyatt Russell) is a major-league baseball player forced out of the game by a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, so he and his wife, Eve (Kerry Condon), attempt to make the best of the situation by putting down roots in a more permanent home. They can pay more attention to their kids, teenage Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle) and younger Elliot (Gavin Warren), while Ray focuses on his health, rather than the sports career that has defined him to this point.
McGuire and his actors do a credible job with what is often the most tedious part of any haunted house movie: the family dynamics that must be delivered via forced-cheer exposition and, later, fill-in-the-blank fights. Russell and Condon are major assets, drawing on their respective past experience playing jock-y types and the quietly disappointed. Moreover, the film refuses to force a series of confrontations over Ray’s masculine sense of self-worth and how it falters without baseball; the pressure he subtly places on his younger son to succeed athletically despite a lack of natural ability and proper nurturing from his dad; or how desperately Eve needs to provide workable insurance for her family via her new job. It lets these conditions bear down on the whole family, exerting a constant, quiet pressure and lurking like whatever ghost thingies keep startling Eve and the kids during their solo swims.
Even after dark, an open-air pool may not be especially scary compared to the creakiest attics, dankest basements, or darkest woods. But it is pretty damn cinematic, and McGuire gets a lot of mileage from the ways that objects underwater can move with a peculiar slow-motion beauty—and the ways that those images, in and out of the pool, can then be distorted by the water’s shifting, shimmering qualities. That said, a lot of Night Swim’s big scare scenes are drawn-out enough to test a horror audience’s patience, devolving into uninspired laps around a pool that simply isn’t big enough to hold the requisite unknown quantities. (An episode involving a swollen, slimy figure is memorable while feeling mandated by producer James Wan, in the first film released since he and fellow horror impresario Jason Blum merged their production companies.)
The filmmakers eventually unveil a solution of sorts to their own limitations involving Ray’s conviction that the pool, pitched to him as a vehicle for much-needed physical therapy, does wonders for his health. The attention to Ray’s desperation and how it spreads a sense of melancholy across his family, particularly Elliot, brings to mind the fractured families of early M. Night Shyamalan—sometimes perhaps overmuch, considering that water and a pool cover teamed up to menace Bruce Willis in Unbreakable. That scene is rehashed here, and a bit with a baseball bat in turn recalls Signs, emphasizing that McGuire, patient as he evidently is, lacks Shyamalan’s natural slow-burn showmanship.
Still, you could do a lot worse than this year’s designated January horror taking cues from Stephen King and Shyamalan, influences that point to Night Swim’s pervasive earnestness, which ultimately keeps it compelling even when it’s not fomenting bone-deep terror. Though it has a few knowing line readings and pointed cuts, this movie takes the idea of a haunted swimming pool about as seriously as possible without invoking the word trauma. (Be thankful for small favors, in other words.) For the ongoing practice of throwing a high-concept horror film into the early-January wilderness, it’s a solid proof of concept.
