A luxury item that seemingly every warm-weather homeowner covets, the swimming pool has somehow become troubled waters for a wide range of movie and TV characters. In The Swimmer, it’s a symbol of personal decay for Burt Lancaster’s alcoholic suburbanite. In the simply-titled Swimming Pool it’s the stuff of Franco-British erotic intrigue. And in Stranger Things, there’s all manner of nastiness lurking beneath the seemingly placid chlorinated surface. In short, there are – ahem – depths to the onscreen pool party, more murky than shimmering.
Night Swim, the new no-frills horror movie from Blumhouse, takes this idea for a few laps, tapping into some primal fears without going in for gore (like the recent hit Five Nights at Freddy’s, this is a PG-13 affair). It’s also more subtle than it might appear; subtlety, after all, is no way to market a movie these days. Director Bryce McGuire has crafted a slow-stroking take on an old horror standby, the return of the repressed, using the family pool as a metaphor for masking what lies beneath. Night Swim eventually runs out of places to go, but not before it weds some sneaky character development to a few good, solid jump moments. It might not find an audience, but it deserves one.
The basic premise could hardly be simpler: this swimming pool is haunted. So, in their own way, is the Waller family, a nuclear brood that moves into a new house during a time of transition. The dad, Ray (Wyatt Russell), was a slugging third baseman for the Milwaukee Brewers whose career was cut short in his prime by multiple sclerosis. His wife, Eve (a first-rate Kerry Condon), simmers in low-key anxiety as she works in admin at the local school and worries about Ray’s physical and mental well-being. Middle-grader Elliot (Gavin Warren) suffers from low self-esteem and the blow of seeing his once-towering father laid low; his older sister, Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle), is a ball of confusion and raging hormones. They’re a quietly neurotic American family facing trying circumstances. And their life is about to get a lot weirder.
A short prologue lays out some of the pool’s ghostly past, and a maintenance worker efficiently explains that the pool taps directly into the ground water beneath, meaning it’s fed by the primal, natural ooze far below the frolicking humans. Fortunately, Night Swim doesn’t make a lot of long speeches about demons and What Lies Beneath or set up teen-friendly warnings about what happens to bad kids. It does use the shimmering quality of water to great advantage, the barely-seen, the maybe-seen, and the sense that once you’re down there you’ve entered a different world, even when you’re still in your own backyard. McGuire goes back to the same well several times – glimpses of apparitions at the pool’s edge, dark, blood-like sludge surging from beneath, ghoulish boogeymen (and boogeywomen) popping into the frame. But it’s all executed with a high level of competence and respect for cinematic craft.
As is often the case with such enterprises, the picture gets muddier with the compulsion to make everything more literal, to explain what might perhaps be better left ambiguous. There’s a curse with a history, and a notion of human sacrifice. The pool giveth, and it taketh away, and Ray experiences both ends of the deal. One moment, the waters bequeath the healing powers of Prince’s Lake Minnetonka. The next, they turn him into a Jack Torrance-like maniac, hunting down his family, an instrument of retribution. Someone, it seems, has to pay for the family’s sins, as venal as they may seem.
Night Swim is at its best when it settles into its free-floating mood of angst and stops worrying about dotting all the i’s. There’s a fascinating tension here between the commercial imperatives of the genre and the willingness of the filmmakers to let the images and moments breathe on their own. This is a genre movie with admirable artistic ambitions, which are often enough met.
