Night Swim
Starring Wyatt Russell and Kerry Condon
Rated M
3.25/5
Night Swim is an average but unfairly-hated horror film about a family that discovers the swimming pool at their new house is haunted.
Night Swim features skilled actors playing likeable (if thinly-developed) characters and several scenes of effective, creeping eeriness. Many of the scares are predictable, but predictability can be a virtue in horror, as you sit on edge waiting for a dreadful eventuality to happen. The chilling opening sequence employs erratic lighting and tight, low camera angles to play with our fear of what we can’t see, and yields a clever twist later on.
Night Swim has some silly or illogical moments, but even the best horror movies can be contrived to some degree. Since the film’s supernatural force is largely confined to the pool, you could argue that the movie would be over if the family just doesn’t use the pool, but social pressures, such as a neighbourhood party or water therapy for father Ray’s (Wyatt Russell) multiple sclerosis, keep the family around the pool. To me, the critical condemnation of Night Swim’s contrivance feels overblown.
Less excusable is the rushed plot and lack of subtlety. Ray’s MS lacks room to breathe in the 98-minute narrative, and the film shows its ghostly threat too often and too blatantly, which dents the suspense, especially after such a mysterious intro. The plot has the theme of sacrifice for your family, but this theme coexists uncomfortably in the climax with the implication that Ray’s disability makes him expendable (and I had a similar issue with, oddly enough, Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood and Honey last year).
An insubstantial but decently scary horror film, Night Swim is playing in most Victorian cinemas.
– Seth Lukas Hynes
