'Night Swim' Tries to Conjure Scares This Weekend

Night Swim, the new horror movie from production company Blumhouse, will try to lure moviegoers into theaters this first non-holiday weekend of 2024. The film will follow the company's success last year with M3gan, but Night Swim isn't getting nearly as positive reviews as the killer doll movie did. Still, low-budget horror movies are often full of surprises, and sometimes even critically panned scarefests click with audiences. Read on for details.

Via Deadline.

Early last year, Jason Blum‘s Blumhouse and James Wan‘s Atomic Monster joined forces to cook up the clever killer doll horror movie M3GAN, a box office hit, and just this week announced their official merger to become the preeminent horror producer bringing together the brains behind some of the most successful films in the genre of the 21st century.

On the heels of the merger confirmation comes Night Swim. Unfortunately, this one is waterlogged, only proving that making a credible killer pool movie is not as easy as playing with dolls.

Based loosely on Rod Blackhurst and Bryce McGuire’s 2014 four-minute short about a woman who disappears into her movie after a spooky encounter in the backyard, that pair are now credited with the story for this feature adaptation, with a screenplay by McGuire who also directs. As it turns out four minutes was the right length for the idea, which borrows a lot from Jaws and Poltergeist, Wan’s Conjuring universe and Blum’s recent Exorcist reboot. Although there are a couple of jump-out-of-your-seat moments here, there was also a good deal of unintentional laughter at the press preview Wednesday night. The biggest guffaw comes at the hour point when Eve, the mother in the family, blurts out, “There’s something wrong with this pool!” That goes for the film as well.

Wyatt Russell plays Ray Waller, a former major league baseball player now in early retirement due to an MS-like degenerative illness that has him sidelined. With his wife Eve (Kerry Condon) and growing kids Izzy (Amelie Hoeferle) and Elliot (Gavin Warren), the family is now ready to settle down after moving around a lot due to dad’s career. They turn up in a nice American town and find the perfect house that even has a pool in the backyard, albeit one that appears not to have been used in years.

In fact it hasn’t, we learn, which will be explained later when the film fills us in on the happenings during the pre-opening credit sequence, set in 1992, when a young girl named Rebecca finds herself eerily sucked into the inner sanctum of the otherwise ordinary-seeming pool during a Night Swim to retrieve a toy. Cut to current times and the emergence of the Wallers as the latest homeowners. They should have checked the past history of the house because just about every tenant went mysteriously missing over the decades. Could the pool be a serial killer?

At any rate, Ray is thrilled with having a pool as he believes it will be great physical therapy, as well as good for the kids, especially Izzy, who is aiming to join the school swim team. His hunch is right as a doctor’s follow-up visit indicates his illness is in remission after a few splashes.

This is one of those movies, though, where really egregious stuff happens to the characters while swimming. Dad gets an early whiff of it when his hand is grossly bloodied while fixing up the pool to bring it back to shape. The family cat becomes an early victim of the haunted water with only his collar still floating.

Get the rest of the story at Deadline.