Night Swim, the latest collaboration between Jason Blum’s prolific horror outfit Blumhouse Production and James Wan’s Atomic Monster, sees director Bryce McGuire (Unfollowed) riffing on ideas from a short film he collaborated on with screenwriter Rod Blackhurst. The latter also shares co-writing credits on this feature. The film stars Wyatt Russell (The Woman in the Window, Under The Banner of Heaven) and Oscar-nominated Banshees of Inisherin alum, Kerry Condon.
Ray Waller (Russell), a former major league baseball player facing the early twilight of his career due to a degenerative illness, is looking to relocate to a the suburbs with his wife Eve (Condon, brilliant) and their two children. After falling head over heals for a surprisingly modestly-priced villa with a swimming pool, the family moves in and settles quickly into their new leafy existence.
While Ray sees miraculous improvements in his health and prognosis almost overnight, which he and Eve are quick to attribute to the hours he spends swimming in the new pool, the rest of the family begins to suspect that an unholy presence might be haunting their new home.
McGuire and Blackhurst blend classic supernatural horror with strong psychological thriller tropes in a story which, despite lacking purpose and direction, still manages to showcase some rather impressive talents all around.
Condon, perhaps unsurprisingly, steals every single scene from under her co-stars as she delivers a sincere and natural turn as a woman weighed down by the responsibilities of her new life. She delivers Eve as the dutiful “soccer mom” who is finding her imminent transition to the family’s main breadwinner more complex than she had wagered for.
For his part, Russell is sadly not given a lot to work with in a screenplay which disappointedly often falls back on the worst kind of horror tropes as we near the end of the last act. In the absence of any kind of plausible motivation, Ray often comes across as a total charisma vacuum despite his supposed past as a champion player.
Still, this is by far one Jason Blum’s best releases for a while which begs the question, why aren’t more cross genre horrors given the attention they fully deserve.
