Rent Night Swim (2024)

Night Swim (aka Wishing Well) review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

The concept of a spooky pool is not entirely a bad idea. It has some promise with fears of drowning and seemingly being pulled into another world. But making that terror compelling goes beyond competent visual effects and staging. There’s only so much of that pool horror one can evoke before these dark waters start to prune when everything else seems lacking. It’s an idea that seems to stay in too long for what could have been a great short film instead of a tedious feature.

The opening sequence, in particular, makes this point. With little dialogue, we watch as a child is lured from their bedroom to the allure of her family pool. Drawn to the waters and enticed to come closer, she is snatched off into the water abyss, never to be seen from again. There’s a good short film. To keep that premise going, there needs to be something more. The new home owners of the killer pool, the Walters, are not too compelling in their staging. The patriarch of Ray (Wyatt Russell) has retired from baseball due to being ill. He’s hoping to settle down in this Minnesotan home to recover and not be reminded of his past, despite the town seeming to be starstruck by having a famous baseball player living in their neighborhood. Ray gets some time in the pool and the weird logic of the waters grants him a renewed strength. But, like a monkey’s paw curling, the rejuvenating pool turns him sinister, leading to an Amityville horror situation.

So much time is spent on the mystery and theatrics of the scary pool that it forgets to give the audience a reason to care about the family. While Ray is well developed as a person who has fallen and unwittingly accepts dark forces to return to former glory, the rest of his family are surprisingly uninteresting victims woven into the frights. Ray’s wife Eve (Kerry Condon) becomes the investigator of the pool’s history, but feels more like ho-hum audience surrogate that gets the info fed to her. The teenager daughter Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle) joins a swim team, but nothing much seems to come of this besides a relationship with the pool that comes off like a whole arc left on the cutting room floor. As for the youngest son Elliot (Gavin Warren), he’s mostly there to react to his dad’s ego and become a life worth saving.

The performances also leave a lot to be desired. Wyatt Russell delvers some laughably bad lines for this material that veers into campy territory. One of the most unintentionally hilarious moments is during the climax, where Ray rejects the pool and nearly dies after saving his son from the pool’s grip. As Russell’s character recovers, he asks his wife about his son’s condition with a line that sounds fine on paper, but is delivered with all the characteristics of a passive stoner, as though Ray is only partially pretending he even cares about his son. These lacking moments ruin the decent attempts at crafting some scary pool moments. I like the idea of a pool feeling endlessly deep as it transports you to another world, but it carries a hallow nature for how disinterested I am with the family.

There is one highly positive thing I can say about Night Swim. This is a fim that takes place in Minnesota during the summer. There is never once a mention about how it’s cold most of the year, that there’s a lot of snow, or that a pool wouldn’t be much of a draw in the winter. The setting is also not portrayed as a dreary midwest suburb, where the summer feel like a believable one with light and color. As a Minnesotan, I’m pleased by this adherence to showing a more earnest depiction of the state beyond the snowy flavor. I only wish there was a far better horror film to go along with that positive representation.