Night Swim

dir: Bryce McGuire

2024

This is a thoroughly unremarkable family focussed horror flick, though competently done. The camera doesn’t fall over, the boom mic doesn’t leer into shot constantly, not too many actors accidentally put stuff in their mouths that they shouldn’t, while the cameras are rolling, at least.

But there was plenty that amused me about the flick, though I don’t know how much of it was intentional.

The opening sequence is confronting enough, yet it kind of ends up being a reworked, pool-based version of the opening sequence from the first It film, by which I mean Part 1 rather than the first time they tried to make it. I’m confusing myself. Whatever it is, it works, I guess, because a child is gone. Gone!

We don’t like to see that. No-one likes it when kids get eaten / captured / drowned, unless they’re absolute sickos. But if we’re going to keep watching a horror flick, and, let’s face it, if you voluntarily started watching the horror flick in question, then, yes, you are some version of a sicko, we’re going to need something more to sustain us.

We might wonder: What got the kid? Was it…something in the pool? Or was it the pool itself?

Is it a haunted demonic pool? Wait, what? An evil pool? That’s the fucking dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of. Tell me more.

Pretty early on, yes, now is the moment where I completely diverge from talking about a film into some other absolute nonsense, I couldn’t help but think of something from many, many years ago.

There used to be a big music CD and video department store on Bourke Street in Melbourne called HMV, in the mall bit. It closed down in 2008, and they were selling stuff very cheap. I bought a CD of a stand-up comedian I’d never heard of before, but I figured even if it wasn’t great it wasn’t much of a big deal.

The CD was Werewolves and Lollipops, by Patton Oswalt, who I adore to this day. Back when I listened to CDs frequently (which seems so bizarre now, like, you had to actually physically load a thing into another thing, then press buttons, and then listen dutifully rather than do three other things at the same time), I listened to it a shit load of times.

Towards the end of the album he talks about a horror flick that sounds so bonkers you would have thought it was made up, but it ended up being absolutely true. He talks about Death Bed: The Bed that Eats People.

So it’s a real flick from the 1970s about a demonic bed that dissolves the people that try to sleep in it. I could not help watching this flick, Night Swim, and thinking “why didn’t they just go with Death Pool: The Pool that Eats Swimmers.

The only thing Patton got wrong was the title doesn’t have “People” in it. I have watched parts of that flick, and it’s as bad as you might think.

It at least makes more sense than what happens here.

What we have here, in this flick with its innocuous title, is a pool that lures people to it and either promises people something, or just tries to kill everyone who get in contact with it.

What is a pool, anyway? Is it the water, or the construction that the water sits in? If a pool was possessed, would it be in the tiles, the lights, the springboard, the banana lounges, the towels or the sunscreen bottle?

“No of course not you fucking idiot, it’s in the water itself, dummy.”

Oh. Of course. The water. The water is trying to kill people and eat them, because…

The water has some kind of malign intelligence, and magical powers, but it also doesn’t have a lot of socialisation or emotional intelligence, because it routinely tries to kill people in stupid and obvious ways that would get it found out pretty easily, and it often does it with heaps of witnesses. Criming 101 says murder people without witnesses. Death Pool must have failed that class.

A family of white dolts move into a place just because it has a pool. The dad of the whitebread family was a former Major League baseball player, but has been cruelly struck down with MS.

The pool, in its bid to convince the head dolt to move into the place, conjures up a baseball, and then tries to drown him.

How’s that meant to work, Death Pool? If the guy actually drowned, how likely is it that the family would still move in?

Well, on that point I am not sure, because considering how the flick ends, I guess the mortgage market is so terrible that people will stay in a place even if it’s haunted because they don’t want to risk bankruptcy or foreclosure.

Someone gives a bonkers explanation way late in the flick as to what the evil pool’s motivation is, but up till that the pool does so many random and yet powerful things that I wonder if the pool itself has bipolar tendencies, because the highs seem really high (curing the baseball players MS) and the lows are very low (trying to kill everyone whenever they take a swim).

If the pool has the power to heal people’s serious illnesses, why is it fucking around with penny ante stuff like drowning cats? Who knows? The motivations of such a complex entity are probably way beyond the ability of mere mortals such as myself to understand.

It may sound like I’m saying the flick is too silly to take seriously, but I assure you the flick takes itself deadly seriously. Kerry Condon plays the mom, and she gets to do none of the acting she’s famous for. She smiles a few times but the rest of the screen time she enjoys requires her solely to maintain Concerned Mom Face.

She’s way better than that. Even with the perfect American accent she does, it’s a waste of her talents. Last week I saw her play a feral IRA terrorist in a flick where she was way scarier than any of the male characters, including Liam Neeson, and here she just gets to say “do you really think you should be doing that?” or “I’m not sure if we can afford it.”

Anyone can do that. I can do that. But I doubt I would look as presentable in a one piece bikini.

It’s debatable. Anyway, as for the explanation for it all, someone says that the pool is kinda like a wishing well, in that you make wishes, but you have to sacrifice someone to get your wish. And the baseball dad has made his wish, and it’s coming down to who’s going to die so that he can go back to the Big Show? The stadiums and the merchandise, the million dollar contracts and the endorsements? Who wouldn’t sacrifice their families to a watery demonic being for that?

People would do it for a decent pizza, let alone a cure for multiple sclerosis.

The end is pretty predictable, yes, but it fits in nicely and neatly, and means no more kids have to die, at least until the inevitable and unnecessary sequel.

There’s one thing that I want to know, and that is: Who snuck that Harold Holt reference into the flick? It can’t be a coincidence. It can’t just a random putting together of names in order to come up with the most ironic ever name for a local high school or swimming pool in a movie about a Death Pool, after a prime minister of Australia who famously drowned, can it?

And it’s only people over a certain amount of age that would even get it.

That made me laugh so hard. This flick? Well, it neither made me laugh, nor did it scare me, and I hate stuff about people not being able to breath. And I especially hate stuff where people are retching up black liquid or pool water constantly. Emetophobes beware.

I mostly rolled my eyes, but since I watched this on my own no-one saw me rolling eyes, so did it even really happen?

I guess that’s between me and Death Pool.

6 times I cannot believe what the remaining family members do at the end of the film, proving Eddie Murphy’s joke from 40 years ago about white families in horror flicks right yet again out of 10

--
“It's funny, isn't it, though. I mean, we evolved out of the water, and some part of our reptilian brain knows we're not supposed to be there anymore. But... I guess that's why we try to tame it so hard. It's like trying to conquer death” – shut up and get back to cleaning the pool, lazybones - Night Swim