Night Swim, Blumhouse’s new movie starring Wyatt Russell and Kerry Condon, is a movie with a concept that’s both absurd and creepy: a spirit is terrorizing a family in and around their pool, using water as its chosen weapon and tapping into the primal fear that just about everyone has experienced at least a few times in their lives of drowning, or losing control in a powerful body of water. While the film is limited to the pool, which gives those feelings a claustrophobic, cinematic place to happen, it’s something that’s relatable in a number of settings.
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Speaking with the film’s stars in support of Night Swim, we asked what their personal worst experiences in the water were. The two were wildly different, with Russell’s being fairly recent, and a pretty detailed story, while Condon’s was much older and a lot less detailed — but also a lot more potentially dangerous.
“I have been on a couple long-range fishing trips, and it was maybe seven, eight years ago with my brother Oliver,” Russell explained. “It was maybe 13-foot seas, and once you get out there on those long-range boats…you leave, and you don’t see land for four or five days, however long you go. And every day, it was sea sickness. It wasn’t in the water, it was sea sickness. You have to fish — you’re paying to be on this fishing trip, so you’re not going to not fish. And it was like, throwing up as I was hook onto like a 45-pound [fish].”
“I do like movies about water and waves,” Condon added. “The worst experience in water — I can’t remember it, so it was definitely bad, but apparently my sister tried to drown me when we were children.”
Based on the acclaimed 2014 short film by Rod Blackhurst and Bryce McGuire, Night Swim stars Wyatt Russell (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier) as Ray Waller, a former major league baseball player forced into early retirement by a degenerative illness, who moves into a new home with his concerned wife Eve (Oscar nominee Kerry Condon, The Banshees of Inisherin), teenage daughter Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes) and young son Elliot (Gavin Warren, Fear the Walking Dead). Secretly hoping, against the odds, to return to pro ball, Ray persuades Eve that the new home’s shimmering backyard swimming pool will be fun for the kids and provide physical therapy for him. But a dark secret in the home’s past will unleash a malevolent force that will drag the family under, into the depths of inescapable terror.
Night Swim hits theaters on January 5, 2024.
