Kerry Condon as Eve Waller in Night Swim. Photograph: © 2023 Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved. Click to view the trailer.
A swimming pool is a great metaphor for the development of Night Swim’s story. In the shallow end, the viewer is immersed in the lives of the characters without too many hardcore scares—everything just floats nicely. In the deep end, even a high consumer of horror movies will be drawn into the depths of the pool where danger awaits.
Director Bryce McGuire did the audience a favor by selling his four-minute short film of the same name, which he directed ten years ago, to Atomic Monster, the production company founded by James Wan, the Australian film producer, screenwriter and director of Malaysian Chinese descent.
Wan is best known for his directorial debut, Saw (2004). More recently, he brought the chills and thrills with the killer doll M3gan, the result of a merger between Wan’s company and another “horror powerhouse”: Jason Blum’s Blumhouse. Blum is known for producing hundreds of films, most of them horror.
Because of the merger, this time we can jump into the backyard pool with a former major league baseball player Ray Waller (Wyatt Russel), who is suffering from a degenerative disease, his worried wife Eve (Kerry Condon), their children Izzy (Amelie Hoeferle) and Elliot (Gavin Warren), and others.
Previously, we’ve seen Russel on Disney+ in Marvel’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021). Condon was recently nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in The Banshees of Inisherin (2022).
Other members of the film crew bringing life to the pool include Charlie Sarroff, the film’s director of photography, whose previous experience with recent horror films such as Smile (2022) helps the viewer experience blue tones and ominous angles.
Director McGuire (born 1970) has previously said in interviews that he was inspired by 1980s films such as Poltergeist and Jaws, especially Jaws.
“Most of the movie takes place in the unspecified present day, but in many ways the movie is about letting go of the past, so it felt right to indulge that feeling of nostalgia at the top,” he said.
While Night Swim nods to the cult classics of the ’80s, it’s definitely a product of its own, riding the renaissance of true contemporary horror. As we’ve seen before, the fusion of the aforementioned scare powerhouses brings us a warm story with proper shock, panic and terror.
This time in the abyss of a backyard pool.
‘Night Swim’ is playing in cinemas now.
