Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Bryce McGuire
Starring: Wyatt Russell, Kerry Condon, Amélie Hoeferle, Gavin Warren
Writer/director Bryce McGuire's 2014 short
Night Swim is a simple piece of horror storytelling. At a
mere five minutes it's essentially a reworking of the famous swimming pool
sequence from Jacques Tourneur's Cat People with a shock
ending tacked on. A decade later McGuire has expanded his short to feature
length, but the result is a movie that struggles to work a simple idea
into a full narrative. Stretching five minutes to 90, McGuire has turned a
thimbleful of tension into a bathful of boredom.
McGuire opens his feature length reworking with a 1992 set prologue that
sets a sinister tone the movie never subsequently replicates. Seeing her
sickly brother's missing toy boat bobbing in her family' swimming pool, a
young girl decides to fish it out. Anyone old enough to remember being
terrorised by public information films as a kid will have a visceral
reaction to seeing the kid edge closer to peril as they stretch across the
water. If McGuire were British I might surmise his film was inspired by
The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, the 1973 Donald Pleasence narrated PIF which highlighted the dangers of
playing around bodies of water and terrorised a generation of kids.
Things go downhill when we cut to the present and the main narrative sets
in. Having given up his baseball career due to the onset of MS, Ray Waller
(Wyatt Russell) and his family - wife Eve (Kerry Condon),
teenage daughter Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle) and young son Elliot (Gavin Warren) - move into the home where tragedy struck in the prologue. Despite
almost drowning when he tries to retrieve a baseball, Ray becomes
enamoured with the pool, and Eve agrees that some time in the water could
help with his condition. It does more than help; it seems the pool's
waters contain healing powers, and Ray finds himself miraculously
returning to his old self.
Of course, there's always a downside to such things. Ray's rehabilitation
comes at a price as the pool begins to terrorise his family, seemingly
requiring a sacrifice in return. It's a reworking of the old Monkey's Paw
story, but modern viewers will likely see it as a
Pet Sematary
knockoff, complete with a family cat that goes missing only to later make
a suspicious return.
McGuire pads out his feature with a lot of clunky mythos building that
never quite settles on a coherent theme. Early on a creepy pool cleaner
puts out the laughable notion that water is angry at man's attempts to
confine it in swimming pools. The film can't decide if the danger is
restricted to the pool or if any body of water, no matter how small, poses
a threat (ala 2013's Ghost Shark, in which the spirit of a murdered shark can materialise in a glass of
water). There's an unintentionally hilarious scene where Condon's Eve
freaks out as she watches someone pour water from a jug, and I was
reminded of that scene in The Happening where Mark Wahlberg
has a similar interaction with a plastic plant. You have to assume Condon
signed on for this before receiving her Oscar nomination for
The Banshees of Inisherin.
The attempts at creating suspenseful sequences become monotonous as
McGuire continually riffs on the same theme, that old
Cat People shtick of a swimmer seeing sinister shapes above
the water line. There are only so many times you can show someone reaching
across a body of water before the audience stops caring whether they fall
in or not. This is the shallow end of horror.
Night Swim is on UK/ROI VOD now.
