A bad PG-13 horror film released in the first week of January? Things are finally getting back to normal at the theaters!

“Night Swim” stars Wyatt Russell and Kerry Condon as a married couple who move into a new home with their children, only to suspect their pool may play host to a supernatural evil. Bryce McGuire makes his directorial debut, while James Wan and Jason Blum produce.

There was once a time “from producer Jason Blum” or “James Wan” meant we were in for a solid spooky time at the movies, or at least a somewhat ambitious passion project from a young director. Nowadays, it all-too-often is no more than a way to get butts into seats for mundane, familiar, and/or poorly made assembly line products. The pair’s first collaboration “Night Swim” is far from the worst thing ever made, but it commits the worst cardinal sin a movie can be guilty of: simply being boring.

Kerry Condon should have won the Oscar for her work in 2022’s “Banshees of Inisherin,” but because the Academy rarely gets things right nowadays, here she is, forced to do a paycheck role. Condon is not bad by any stretch, but she is simply given nothing to do except look concerned. Wyatt Russell is also not *bad* but he simply seems miscast, playing a retired MLB player and father of two teenagers. Russell has shown he can be both dramatic and charismatic, but neither of those traits find the surface very often here.

This has some incredibly goofy creatures designs, and the main look of the evil pool, a swirling black cloud, simply looks like someone “had nature call” and is hard to take serious. There are a few (very brief) moments of camp or amusing line deliveries (Russell tells his doctor “we have a pool” in such an accidental braggadocios tone, I cackled), but there is otherwise so little going on that it is impressive that the filmmakers managed to drag this to 98 minutes (my friend and I started checking our watches at the 30-minute mark). If this had been rated-R and leaned a bit more into the insanity that James Wan is known for, perhaps it could have entered “so bad it’s good” territory, but there aren’t even many acts of violence or demonic imagery to distract viewers from the droll story.

I’m not easily scared in horror films so I’m not always the best person to judge their effectiveness, but I feel fairly confident in saying there are no true attempts at being scary here. There are a few (fairly telegraphed) jump scares, but other than that most of the film consists of one of our characters getting into the pool, swimming underwater (for two minutes, like they’re trying to be the next Kate Winslet on the set of “Avatar 2”), seeing a shape, and getting pulled back underwater, all before narrowly escaping. Rinse/repeat that for the better part of an hour before things go absolutely off the deep end (teehee) in the third act, in which the film just starts inventing rules for its demon water.

There isn’t much to say about “Night Swim” other than it’s hard to imagine a more boring film being released in 2024 (friendly reminder: we are 4/366 days in as I make this prediction). The film is shot fine-enough, I guess (cameras were rolling, lights were turned on) and the cast at least appears to be giving some effort and not mailing it in, so I can’t knock this film the same way you would a Netflix cash-grab. But with a handful of genuinely good films playing in theaters (“Poor Things,” “Boys in the Boat,” “Wonka”) and streaming at home (“The Holdovers,” “Oppenheimer,” “Killers of the Flower Moon”), there’s simply nothing about “Night Swim” that justifies you spending your time and money to go out and see it.

Critics Rating: 2/10