Horror is one of a few genres where convention-breaking might not always be what the audience is looking for. Familiarity can be a good thing. When we watch horror movies, we expect certain tropes to show up, and when they do it can elicit a feeling of catharsis – a sign of recognition given from the filmmaker to the audience.
Perhaps more so than most, in his new film “Night Swim,” writer/director Bryce McGuire packs an hour and a half with tropes galore and numerous references to other horror films. However, in doing so the construction of “Night Swim” almost feels antithetical to its underlying exploration of the power – and danger – of nostalgia.
“Night Swim” opens in the summer of 1992 as a young Rebecca (Ayazhan Dalabayeva) is attacked by a mysterious entity that lives in her swimming pool. Decades later, Ray and Eve Waller (Wyatt Russell and Kerry Condon) are looking for a fresh start. Ray is a former professional baseball player who has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and this house – one in a sunny, suburban neighborhood with a pool in the backyard – seems like a great place to start to rebuild. Their two kids can swim anytime they want, they can throw neighborhood cookouts, and Ray has a built-in spot to do his physical therapy in the water. What could go wrong?
Turns out, quite a lot! But the actual lore of the haunted swimming pool itself – something about it being fed by a natural spring that used to be an ancient wishing well – is just vague enough to make the audience not really care about the mystery of the pool’s origins. What McGuire seems more interested in is turning our nostalgic notions against us.
Baseball. Cookouts. Swimming pools. These are part of the iconography of Americana, of something deemed safe and warm, evoking a place and a feeling that people are always longing to return to. At some point, all of these images are turned into something to be wary of. Ray is the family member with the strongest connection to the house, his body becoming stronger the more time he spends in the pool. He’s overrun with this yearning to play baseball again, to find his way back to the safety of the American pastime. He works out incessantly, taking videos of himself with an old camcorder, a physical representation of his longing for the past.
But in “Night Swim,” not even baseball is safe anymore. And the pool – the symbol of summer and fun – is the worst of them all. McGuire takes everything you’ve ever thought to be scared of about a pool and runs with it, from the fear of falling in the water to the terror of being held down in its depths. The shape of the pool itself, the way it slopes down appearing impossibly steep, is used smartly. During numerous sequences, I was reminded of the deep fear I had of pool skimmers, terrified to reach into their murky depths, as well as all the times my parents warned me about getting stuck in the drain at the bottom of the deep end. Harmless pool games, like diving for quarters, suddenly become laden with danger. In a sequence where the Waller’s daughter Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle) plays Marco Polo with a boy, the camera acts as her eyes, peeking through her lashes at someone just ahead of her, their shape blurred and unrecognizable until the shape suddenly becomes real.
So everything that we’ve been taught to enjoy becomes tainted with something cruel, something that warns us not to wish for that sentimental pang of pleasure. But as much as the nostalgia bait and switch works, McGuire’s clear nostalgia for the films of the past takes away from that more interesting through line. It’s perfectly normal for a writer/director making their feature debut to reach for images and ideas that are familiar to them, to reference other work in their own. But particularly as the film ramps up, its climax feels so much like something we’ve seen before as to become lackluster. McGuire may be warning us off of nostalgia, but it seems he hasn’t quite yet learned that lesson himself.