Night Swim (2024) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Wyatt Russell, Kerry Condon, Amélie Hoeferle, Gavin Warren
screenplay by Bryce McGuire
directed by Bryce McGuire

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Welp, it’s come to this: a haunted swimming pool. There was a slasher movie set in a public pool (2001’s The Pool), and pools have been at the centre of some seriously creepy set-pieces in films ranging from the original Cat People to the remake of Cat People, from Let the Right One In to the remake of Let the Right One In. As far as definitively haunted swimming pools go, however, the only precedent I can think of is in Poltergeist III, and that one came in a package deal with a haunted skyscraper so it’s a bit of a cheat. Swimming was the only form of physiotherapy that didn’t feel like penance when I was growing up. Before my family put a pool in the backyard, I would swim at my next-door neighbour’s place or the rehabilitation centre where I took swimming lessons as a child. At one of those lessons, I broke my arm, but it didn’t scare me off pools–it scared me off swimming instructors. One evening, on vacation with my parents in Florida, I swam in the hotel pool, and every time I went below the surface, a pretty girl followed me down. We would bob there near the bottom, staring at each other within kissing distance through a veil of chlorine. Not a word ever passed between us; it was strange and wonderful. The pool has since become my respite from screens. I don’t know how to meditate, although I suspect that’s what I’m doing in there. Swimming has always seemed to liberate me mind, body, and spirit. I’m sentimental about swimming pools, in other words, and looked forward to Night Swim, the new film from horror megaproducers Jason Blum and James Wan, ruining them for me.

A prologue takes us back to 1992, halcyon days for me but not for young Rebecca Summers (Ayazhan Dalabayeva), who spots her sick brother’s toy boat in the pool one night and becomes determined to retrieve it on his behalf. (That déjà vu feeling you’re experiencing is because you’ve seen It.) Perched tippytoe in bunny slippers on the edge of the pool with a skimmer in her hand, she loses her balance and falls in. Underwater, she looks up and sees her mother extending a helping hand–a mirage, alas. The lights begin to flicker. Rebecca decides to give up when suddenly the boat resurfaces. She snares it this time but vanishes–drowns, I suppose–before she can get out of the pool, now surrounded by ghostly figures. A lone bunny slipper floats to the top; if you’re of a certain age, you will mentally insert Mark Snow’s “X Files” theme at this point. I promise not to analyze Night Swim in agonizing, scene-by-scene detail, but I can’t let this opening sequence go without mentioning the cutaway to the pool drain after Rebecca disappears. If we’re meant to infer that Rebecca went down the cheese-grater drain–how? There’s no syntactical logic to it. If it’s a symbolic image, it lacks the weight of design, looking too much like the second-unit insert it undoubtedly is. When Hitchcock cuts to the shower drain in Psycho, it’s to show precious life trickling away. When Night Swim does it, it’s because Psycho did it.

Decades later, the Wallers–husband and wife Ray (Wyatt Russell) and Eve (Kerry Condon) and their children, teenage Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle) and her younger brother Elliot (Gavin Warren)–are shopping for their forever home. While they’re scouting the Summers place, Ray, a “big-league baseman” diagnosed with MS and perhaps delusionally operating under the assumption that his career is merely on pause, spots a baseball in the pool. He reaches for it, falls in, and gets all snarled up with the pool blanket, but an inspirational flashback to a homerun gives him a burst of life-saving buoyancy. Sold! Ray convinces Eve they should buy the house for the pool’s therapeutic potential–and, boy, does it deliver. As it turns out, the pool is spring-fed, meaning it filters and heats itself and is, in general, a dermatologist’s dream. It performs miracles, too, first erasing a cut on Ray’s hand, then putting his MS into remission. This causes Ray to regress a little and sideline the non-sports-inclined Elliot with a renewed focus on baseball and his fanbase. Think Don Ameche or Seth Brundle on their power trips–and that’s before black sludge whizzes up from the pool drain into Ray’s ears, filling his head with morbid thoughts.

The pool’s first victim is Cider, the family cat, lured to his off-camera demise by that fateful toy boat. Inflicting harm on fictitious animals is often a scuzzy empathy hack and Night Swim is no exception, but I’m intrigued that the water, which heals in exchange for a sacrifice, seems to pick up on the Wallers’ short-lived concern for their missing kitty and not count its loss towards Ray’s karmic debt. In fairness, Elliot does carry a torch for Cider. He’s also the first to figure out the pool is two-faced, like the coin he leaves on the bottom of the pool for his father to find. I love Elliot, a character built on the dissonance of his scrawny frame amongst a family of natural athletes. (Mom is actually studying for a special-ed degree but swims like an Olympian.) There is a remarkable moment, curiously easy to miss, where we realize that Ray has taped himself doing practice swings over precious home movies of Elliot as a youngster. It appears to register with Elliot, whose long hair and ambiguous nickname (“Ellie”) suggest his fears of inadequacy run deeper than “Diary of a Wimpy Kid.” Warren’s haunted performance adds untold layers; Elliot’s the family Cassandra, like many a gen-Alpha kid is doomed to become. Harder to overlook that the world’s on fire when you’re born in flames, after all.

A better movie would have placed him at the forefront of a coming-of-age narrative, though I truly can’t figure out how the sensitively conceived Elliot thrived in such a creatively starved and frankly ableist endeavour. Here’s a film with cursed water and it’s represented by silly pool ghosts, which feels like more of Wan’s peculiar tendency to over-garnish his supernatural villains, e.g. Annabelle, in which the titular doll turned out to be a benign object yoked to a run-of-the-mill demon. There’s a whole lot you could do to transform the accoutrements of a swimming pool–the blanket, the diving board, the jets, the vacuum (Blum was a producer on Paranormal Activity 2 and knows this)–into deathtraps, yet the film’s M.O. is to have waterlogged zombies play peekaboo with our hapless heroes. One set-piece is on the verge of getting it, where the Estella Warren-esque Izzy invites the captain of the JV Christian Swim Club, Ronin (Elijah Roberts), over for a private pool party (wink wink) and they play Marco Polo under the cover of darkness. An unsupervised teenage jock cloaked in righteousness, a girl robbed of her vision by the rules of the game, a pool with a mind of its own: this is how you compound suspense. And yet, instead of using the boyfriend to ratchet up the tension nor, indeed, layer it, the sequence ushers him to some offscreen no-splash zone as it cracks open a can of cheap scares. More interesting is how their evening ends: with Ronin kissing a clearly traumatized Izzy goodbye. From her befuddled reaction, it’s as if he transformed from Leonardo DiCaprio into Billy Zane before her very eyes–not that he has the humility to notice.

Based on this feature-length expansion of his calling-card short film of the same name, writer-director Bryce McGuire is not the future of horror. Still, he betrays a compassionate identification with his disenfranchised characters that would be of note within or without the genre. Which is why the movie’s bad-faith messaging feels like a sucker punch. Learning of the connection between Rebecca’s disappearance and her new house/swimming pool, Eve seeks out the girl’s mother, who lives in town. There is something refreshing, even progressive, about the Wallers not being as conspicuously well-to-do as the Summers, an Asian family; these aren’t live-laugh-love gentrifiers helping whiten the neighbourhood. But it becomes clear that the function of race here is to give the movie’s mysticism the threatening tang of the Far East, with Mrs. Summers (Jodi Long) assuming the mantle of Dragon Lady as she recounts the heartwarming tale of feeding her daughter to the pool to cure her sick son, who went on to be a USAID ambassador–saving “thousands” during the Sudanese refugee crisis–and buy her a nice house. Later, when Ray deduces that the price of his health is Elliot’s life, he walks into the drink, never to return.

For those keeping score, a child is killed to liberate another from disability for the betterment of humanity, while a disabled man kills himself to unburden his family. If this isn’t precisely why he does it, it is the net result, and the final shot of Night Swim is a P.O.V. from the bottom of the emptied pool with the surviving Wallers, contemplative but hardly gloomy, gazing down at us as a bulldozer drops a load of dirt on the lens.[i] Since its legalization in Canada, assisted suicide has taken a toll on the morale of the disabled because the powers that be have enthusiastically endorsed it as an alternative to health-care and welfare reform. This, in turn, has emboldened eugenic voices on social media–and with the all-but-wholesale rejection of masking and vaccines acting as a referendum on the perceived worth of disabled lives, there are very few safe spaces left for the most vulnerable among us. Corny to say it, maybe, but horror movies should always be one of those spaces. It’s a genre that, no matter how much it’s pushing the envelope in terms of violence and suffering, is rarely on the side of the oppressors like this. I guess, in that sense, Night Swim scared the shit out of me.

THE BLU-RAY DISC
Night Swim docks on Blu-ray via Universal in a 2.39:1, 1080p presentation. Cinematographer Charlie Sarroff[ii] (Smile) uses Cooke S4 lenses, presumably to downplay the digital sharpness of the image and introduce distortions that are evocative of submergence, and everything comes through with a glassy, analog clarity. Through no fault of the transfer, Night Swim is underlit in the current fashion, although there’s a reasonable amount of detail in the toe of the image and the compression is above reproach. And despite a parched palette surely meant to evoke the southwestern suburbia of Spielberg, the blues really pop. The attendant 7.1 DTS-HD MA track is aces: The sound designers have a field day with gurgling water and the aural contrast above and below the surface, treating the 360° soundstage like the four corners of the swimming pool. Jump scares molest the subwoofer with gratifying intensity. On another track, McGuire records a feature-length commentary dominated by the director half of his personality, albeit not in an arrogant way. He tends to follow his memories of the production down a rabbit hole until he’s lost in Proustian revelry–but then he’ll notice one of Night Swim‘s myriad cinematic references (The Natural, Super 8, and so on) and snap out of it. Early on, he reveals that assistant editor Daniel Myers has MS and monitored its depiction both on the page and on screen. Whether he and McGuire ever discussed the broader implications of the movie’s ending, McGuire doesn’t say. Certainly, McGuire himself avoids discussing them.

Additionally on board this so-called “Collector’s Edition” is a quartet of making-of featurettes. Burnishing the reputations of Wan and Blum, “Masters of Fear” (7 mins.) is the usual circle-jerk feedback loop, but kudos to Blum for selling Condon on the material by proposing that her disinterest in horror would lead her to play things more naturally and therefore more persuasively. It’s probably the smartest thing he’s ever said. “Demons from the Depths” (7 mins.) is about the movie’s two main “drowned ghosts,” barely glimpsed on screen though here lavished with microscopic attention. With stringy blonde hair, bulging eyes, and a perpetually open mouth, the one called “The Bloated Man” is a dead ringer for Trump. Makeup FX designer Justin Raleigh walks us through the trials and tribs of crafting watertight monster suits, which is not uninteresting; you love to see the effort in this day and age. Similarly informative (even as it oversells the universality of aquaphobia), “Into the Deep” (6 mins.) delves into the complexities of basing a movie around a swimming pool and reveals that Condon was, unsurprisingly, a competitive swimmer in childhood. Lastly, “Marco Polo” (4 mins.) highlights the titular sequence in a sort of backwards acknowledgment that it’s the film’s only highlight. For some reason, McGuire’s original short is excerpted throughout but not included in full. DVD and digital versions of Night Swim are enclosed with the Blu-ray in the U.S.; the Canadian release drops the latter.

116 minutes; PG-13; 2.39:1 (1080p/MPEG-4); English 7.1 DTS-HD MA, English DVS 2.0, French DTS 5.1, Spanish 7.1 Dolby TrueHD; English SDH, French, Spanish subtitles; BD-50 + DVD-9; Region-free; Universal

[i] Wan made this mistake before, of course. In Lights Out, a depressed woman announces that she’s saving her family’s lives before putting a gun to her own head and pulling the trigger. Just when I thought it was safe to go back in the water…

[ii] Note that the film had a separate underwater DP, Ian S. Takahashi, whose work can be seen in virtually every movie, TV show, and music video featuring a body of water from the past 10 years.