Splash into terror with this year's January horror sensation- "Night Swim", coming to you from renown horror-comedy makers at Blumhouse. Seizing the once annual spot of the cultural phenom "M3GAN", this film similarly embraces its goofy concept, but sure knows how to engage your fears while smirking at its own premise. Producers Jason Blum and James Wan, both respected maestros of the horror genre, manage to personify an everyday object- a swimming pool, into an entity of terror and anxiety, cranking up their skill at making audiences shudder.
What creates an interesting twist is how something so relaxing and leisurely becomes a source of terror, unlike past thrillers like "Rubber" and "In Fabric", which centred around a homicidal tire and a murderous dress respectively.
The pool in focus isn't particularly extravagant- not a neat kidney-shaped pool from the 50s, neither one from our current era adorned with slides, a swim-up bar and a grotto. It's your regular suburban concrete rectangle, a pool, familiar to those who spent their childhood summers in Southern California in the 70s, playing Marco Polo.
Writer-director Bryce McGuire intelligently transforms this spacious void into an entity teeming with an insatiable evil in a mundane suburban setting, an idea as old as Stephen King and David Lynch's works. Despite the simplicity, the director achieves this by building tension from the get-go, coupled with strategic sound designing and skilled camera work.
The movie starts with a 1992 incident where a young girl is mysteriously devoured by the pool as she tries to retrieve a toy boat. Fast-forward to the modern-day, a family moves into the same home, oblivious of its haunted past. McGuire brims the visuals with a sense of mystery through inverted shots and reflections, signifying that all isn't as inviting as it looks.
The new residents, the Waller family consisting of a retired baseball player Ray Waller (Wyatt Russell), his wife, Eve (Kerry Condon), and their two children, are daunted by the task of cleaning the old pool but are optimistic about the stability this house near the Twin Cities could bring.
The pool offers a ray of hope for the family- from hope of healing for Waller to proving to be a social life for the teenage daughter Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle). McGuire creates a distorted underwater environment, adding on to the suspense. However, the movie errs through overutilization of jump scares and persistent shots of invisible spectators near the pool's edge.
Additionally, the explanation of the entity causing the terror dials down the intrigue several notches, revealing it to be less fascinating than the initial idea.
However, the final revelation is laughably entertaining, with exceptional supporting roles featuring Nancy Lenehan as a friendly real estate agent and Ben Sinclair as an eccentric pool technician. Throw into the mix is Russell's incredulous reactions to the mounting absurd situations. Rest assured, it's a plunge worth taking into this pool of horror-comedy!
