Jonah Naplan   January 5, 2024

For the longest time, we’ve gotten a bad horror movie in the early weeks of January each year. So it’s absolutely no surprise that this January we’ve received another. And for its outlandish concept—it’s about a pool that eats people—“Night Swim” is among the most frustrating, especially considering the talent involved. Working from a script by Bryce McGuire, who also makes his feature debut here, “Night Swim” is, at its best, boring and uninspired, despite a couple of solid ideas and committed performances across the board. Unlike the screenplay, elastic runs from Wyatt Russell (the son of Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn!) and Kerry Condon (who was terrific in “The Banshees of Inisherin”!) don’t take the movie too seriously, in the fear of giving the narrative mixed messaging and tonal inconsistencies. Those sincere efforts, however, can’t stay afloat.

The movie takes place in Minnesota—where I lived for about a year and a half of my life, fun fact—and it centers on your average suburban family, the Wallers; Mom (Condon), Pop (Russell), and two kids Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle) and Elliot (Gavin Warren). The foursome have just moved into a new house, hoping to finally set down roots after Dad’s busy career as a baseball player on the Milwaukee Brewers that relocated the family all around the country as he was traded from team to team comes to an end when he’s diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The new house has a pool, which makes it perfect for Dad’s revised exercise routine and also an ideal venue for neighborhood parties and sports team hang-outs. This pool, however, harbors a deadly secret; an opening scene that flashes back to 1992 depicts the curious disappearance of a young girl named Rebecca Summers as she hopped into the water in the middle of the night to retrieve her brother’s toy boat. On numerous occasions, the family experiences similarly strange phenomenons—imagining people that aren’t really there, getting pulled under by an invisible force, and watching as the pool drain releases an inky black gas, to name a few.

Yet despite this goofy concept, perfectly in line with other January horror releases like “M3GAN” from last year, and “Escape Room” from a couple years prior, “Night Swim” never takes its central idea in any fun, let alone innovative, directions. McGuire demonstrates very early on his obsession with jump scares, and this film has too many to count, the better half of which I certainly couldn’t recall or describe to you. Anticipate all the usual suspects—scary heads appearing behind characters’ shoulders that weren’t there a second ago, sudden jolts of violent physicality that tug characters every which way, and lights (in this case, pool lights) flickering on and off with seemingly no one operating the switch. Sticking with the basics is just fine, but the movie doesn’t do anything exciting with them; nothing that makes us jump, or instills dread, or even—God forbid—makes us truly care about the characters’ safety.

It could be because, well, a swimming pool is not inherently scary—most homes in the southwest have one now, and they’re typically all lit up during the hot summer months with friends and family. Even still, great horror movies have convinced us of the terrors of everyday objects, despite their high-concepts that would seem absurd on paper—think about how the founding slasher movies of their time probably seemed absolutely ludicrous when they first came out, yet the subgenre has now ascended to a second life. The biggest problem with “Night Swim” is that it takes itself far too seriously to be fun, despite a couple of committed performances from the parents who are clearly aware of the kind of movie they’re in.

The real shame of “Night Swim” is that it’s just another misfire to add to the ongoing list of similarly frustrating horror outings that can range anywhere from the bad, to the boring, to the entertaining but emotionally empty. The movie takes nibbles from each; the filmmaking itself is so predictable that it teeters on tedious; long moments without any action or scares are a chore to get through; and none of the characters are interesting enough for us to latch on. Eventually, “Night Swim” tries to explain what’s really going on here, which further deteriorates from the impact of the dumb concept—it’s a lot more fun to remain in mystery about this ferocious pool than it is applying an explanation as to why it’s acting up.

Of course, we cannot expect each year in movies to start off with a bang—2023’s fantastically entertaining “M3GAN” was merely a fluke—but it’s especially intriguing to watch how our multiplexes once occupied with Oscar-bait movies are steadily taken over by this sort of low-brow cinema within two or three weeks. And it happens roughly every year, as the cursed January season remains standing. “Night Swim” might only be the first theatrical release of 2024, but as far as I’m concerned, the year has already sunk.

Now playing in theaters.