Forced into early retirement by a degenerative illness, former baseball player Ray Waller moves into a new house with his wife and two children. He hopes that the backyard swimming pool will be fun for the kids and provide physical therapy for himself. However, a dark secret from the home's past soon unleashes a malevolent force that drags the family into the depths of inescapable terror. Every single year, January begins with a cliche ridden, lazily written, and trope filled PG-13 horror flick from Blumhouse Studios, custom cooked and packaged for dimwitted teens in high school. While I wasn’t crazy about last January’s Blumhouse movie M3gan, I still found it to be far more serviceable than most films released in early January. Unfortunately, 2024’s January Blumhouse release reinstates the trend of starting the year off with a disposable and instantly forgettable horror flick. I’ll touch on the positives before I dive into the obvious issues with the movie. The performances are genuinely not bad, with Wyatt Russel doing everything he can to bring his likable energy to a paper thin script. Russel is definitely believable as a professional baseball player family man dad, which is why it’s so unfortunate that he’s only given surface level material to work with. Kerry Condon as the wife to Russel’s character is also giving her best effort along with the kid actors who play their children in the movie. There are also some inventive shots by cinematographer Charlie Sarroff that effectively give the underwater environment some semblance of eeriness.
Other than those few promising aspects and a couple of semi-entertaining sequences in the pool, Night Swim is sadly just an intriguing short film concept stretched out to a 98 minute slog. Funny enough, this movie is in fact based on a short film and it really shows, as the majority of the runtime is padded by your typical “character hears noise and goes to inspect then jump-scare, rinse and repeat” affair. It does not help whatsoever that the script by Bryce McGuire is loaded with nearly every line of cringy and hokey dialogue you’ve heard a billion times over in traditionally bad horror movies. There’s a line I believe from Wyatt Russel’s character where he says something like “the pool healed my injury” and I turned to the friend I saw it with and said “Aquaman.” Yeah, it really felt as if the two writers didn’t have enough material to work with so they just made up a bunch of bullshit lore about the pool showcasing healing powers and even a laughable demon possession ability. So many elements and ideas are pulled from other horror movies to the extent that the third act has an entire exposition dump revealing what’s really going on. The problem is, this seemingly major plot revelation says a lot, but by the end, it actually tells us very little. There’s not even a basic motivation behind why the underwater demonic spirit is doing all these horrible things to those who go in the pool at night. In every good horror flick, there is at least a fundamental reason for why the slasher or entity is doing bad things to people, but none of that is to be found here.
To make matters worse, there are only two real kills in the entire film and both of them lack any weight or feeling of genuine consequence. The last 20 minutes turns into a generic demon possession movie with jump scares just about every minute and makes whatever intriguing set up seem utterly worthless. I guess this is what happens when an interesting concept for a short film gets stretched out into an hour and a half feature length picture with no real suspense or natural tension. Even though I’ve seen far worse, this is a perfect example of why January is almost always the perfect dumping ground for generic and disposable PG-13 horror flicks, made very specifically for high schoolers with a Tik Tok level attention span. Overall, in spite of an interesting concept and an honest effort by Wyatt Russel/Kerry Condon, Bryce McGuire’s Night Swim is a lazily written, generically executed, and trope ridden January horror film from Blumhouse that will ultimately sink to the bottom of its viewer’s memory shortly after its overly padded 98 minute duration.
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