‘Night Swim’ Review: It’s ‘The Amityville Horror’ in a Swimming Pool, with a Fear Factor That’s All Wet
variety.comOwen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic A year ago, “M3GAN,” one of the snazziest films ever produced by Blumhouse Productions, was the exception to the rule of first-weekend-of-January trash thrillers.
The movie was witty and shivery in a preposterous way, its robot doll scenario actually had a thing or two to say about AI, and it gave us the year’s most memorable android-girl dance meme — at least, until Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday Addams danced with her hands to Lady Gaga’s “Bloody Mary.” But now, opening in the same junkyard weekend slot, we have another Blumhouse production, “Night Swim,” which restores a certain order to the cinematic universe by being as tepid and unscary as a proper early-in-January movie should be. “Night Swim” is about a family that moves into a house with a backyard swimming pool that’s haunted, and everything about the spirits that rule this pool — the ghost backstory, the greenish-brown sludge that oozes up from the drain, the toys that move of their own volition, the watery glimpses of ominous figures standing by the pool, who then vanish — is random and second-hand in a way that recalls the “Amityville Horror” films.
This one, waterlogged as it is, should have been called “The Aquatyville Horror,” and some might consider that a recommendation.
But I never cared for the “Amityville” movies, with their “ominous” buzzing flies and their grab-bag atmosphere of threadbare haunted trickery.
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