15/18
Saw this at the Ghent film festival 2024
Tale
Showcases a suburban house inhabited by a mysterious entity.. Although well-received at the Sundance Film Festival, some viewers walked out due to its intensity. One person said, "I cannot take this stress so late at night.". Referenced in Amanda the Jedi Show: NIGHT SWIM is Garbage | Explained (2024).
Yet, I’m disappointed all over
Booked this movie for two reasons: I’m a long-time fan of horror movies, and I saw the overly positive reviews. It is a real pity that we do not get to know the main characters and their relationships from the outset. The initial house tour with the real estate agent that the story started, reveals nothing informative, missing a unique opportunity to enlighten us about the family and the house they are about to buy. The building team arriving later, with two painters one of which refuses to enter one of the rooms, shows the first sign that something odd is ahead, but we hear from it only second-hand and know nothing of his reasoning.
I detected only a single moment that succeeded in sending some chill signals through my spinal cord
Later, once the family is settled in their new home, the friend of the son appears but is also not properly introduced, yet he becomes important afterwards. As a seasoned horror-watcher I recognize several downtrodden attempts to impress us that something sinister existed within the house, but it all falls flat on arrival. Like the many moments the camera goes up and down the stairs, at high-speed velocity, with no connection to the story at hand. The tour around the house that the camera shows us, while still no one present yet (the real estate agent was yet to come) is a nice gimmick, a very fast show around of all corners, rooms and outside views on steroids, but not more than nice it is.
Other eerie moments, if any, went completely past me
That happens in one of the final scenes in front of the large mirror (original woodwork, one century old, as we learned from the real estate agent). It may come as a shock that a wardrobe shelf collapses at the very moment that a couple makes love on the bed in the same room, creating a sort of jump scare. In a newly redecorated house, we can expect that for very natural reasons, like shoddy work from the building team we saw earlier. All in all, I don’t care much of the four (the family) plus one (friend of the son) main protagonists, due to missing background about their past, their characters and how they relate.
Ditto are we left out of the equation where the motives of the "Presence" are concerned
It seems that the new owners are not involved in the past of the “Presence”, so no revenge or related reasons to scare or annoy them. The story as it develops is not boring, and we were entertained all right with some unexpected developments. But I expected more, given the reviews I saw, which may be my fault and my fault alone.