By Dustin Rowles | Film | January 5, 2024 |
By Dustin Rowles | Film | January 5, 2024 |
(There’s a spoiler later on in this review)
In college, I worked as a cashier at a grocery store for several years. Anyone who has ever worked as a cashier has heard someone tell a form of the exact same joke in response to a missing price tag or obliterated barcode at least once every shift from some dumbass who thinks he’s the funniest guy on the planet and is the first person to ever make the joke: “I guess that must mean it’s free, huh?”
Hahahaha, go f**k yourself.
The equivalent of that joke in the movie reviewer world is a new or new-ish critic writing a review of the first film of the year and leading with the headline, “[Title] Is the Best Movie of the Year!” or “[Title] Is the Worst Movie of the Year!” as though they are the first reviewer to come up with that joke.
Hahahaha, go f**k yourself.
Night Swim is the cinematic equivalent of that joke: It’s obvious and dumb, and my god, is it tedious. It is based on director Bryce McGuire’s 2014 short film, and it should have remained a short film. The premise is incapable of sustaining a full-length feature. It’s a haunted swimming pool in the backyard of a suburban home for a family of four. The pool (heh) of potential victims is tiny! And if one of them dies, who else is going to get back into the pool? The only reason why the four characters continue to get into the pool at all is because McGuire and his co-writer, Rod Blackhurst, have to come up with reasons for characters not to share their demonic encounters with each other until the end. (Sister to brother: “Dad is so happy at our new house! You can’t tell our parents about the dead girl you saw in the pool!”)
The problem with a full-length haunted pool movie is that the filmmakers have to build a story around it. Here, Wyatt Russell (who I swear looks like a young Jim True-Frost from certain angles) plays a professional baseball player recently diagnosed with MS who moves into the house because the pool will offer him a convenient way to exercise. What he finds, however, is that swimming in the pool reverses the effects of his degenerative disease. A few laps in the pool, and Ray Waller can literally knock the cover off a baseball while hitting a monster homerun (let’s put aside the fact that, in the rare case when a cover is actually knocked off a ball, it usually dribbles harmlessly in the infield).
Ray’s a huge fan of this pool! Unfortunately, everyone else in his family has terrible encounters with it, including his son, Elliot (Gavin Warren), who has a run-in with the ghost of the girl who died in the pool 30 years prior. It turns out a number of people mysteriously died in the pool, a fact that the real estate agent neglected to mention (oopsie!). Eve (the mom played by Kerry Condon) does some investigating only to discover from the dead girl’s mom that the pool has healing properties, but it also requires a sacrifice. It’s not too hard to figure out the rest of the movie from there …
spoiler alert: The pool chooses to sacrifice the son, Elliot, to the benefit of the baseball player dad, but dad sacrifices himself to save his son. The End.end spoiler alert
… It’s not just that the mystery is dumb and the ending is bad, it’s also that very little happens over the course of the film. The original short film, which is also fairly uneventful, is not much longer than three minutes. Night Swim has maybe three worthwhile minutes in the entire 98-minute film. There are maybe two decent jump scares, and the rest is filler between scenes in which various characters slowly swim around in a pool and see vaguely creepy things. There’s no blood. There’s no violence. Only two characters die, both off-screen. It’s a tame PG-13 film, a real snoozer that may actually be in the running for worst film of 2024 but for the fact that no one will remember it by February. It doesn’t even feature the REM song! What even is the point?