The Midnight Swim (Movie Review)

After their mother’s apparent death in the depths of the ominously named Spirit Lake, three sisters gather to reconnect and put her affairs in order. It’s the first time home in years for the oldest, Annie (Jennifer Lafleur), but she quickly reestablishes the maternal role she had with her sisters, which in their childhood filled the void left by their often distant mother. The middle sister, Isa (Aleksa Palladino) shares her mother’s esoteric interests in spirituality and past lives and sparks off a relationship with Josh (Ross Partridge) an old friend and former crush of her younger sister. This youngest sister, June (Lindsay Burdge), is also the most enigmatic of the three. She appears to struggle from some kind of mental illness and has peculiar habits such as only eating alone and, most notably, interacting with the world only through the lens of a video camera, which she constantly uses to film a “documentary” that her and her sisters know she has no intention of ever making. 

We watch the sisters reconnect through moments of giddy playfulness, like filming an impromptu lip-synch of uplifting feminist kiddie-kitch pop song “Free to Be… You and Me”, while other moments of cathartic levity take a darker turn, like when raiding their mother’s closet and taking turns at impersonating her starts as fun, but quickly descends into reliving some of the verbal abuse they received from her as children. The three sisters are spot-on in both casting and performance. The illusion is so strong it’s easy to forget that these aren’t actual siblings.

The Midnight Swim is haunted by two ghosts. One comes from some local folklore about the lake which is alleged to be haunted by the spirits of seven sisters who once drowned because each one leapt in to rescue the previous one and only succeeded in dragging each other down. The other comes in the figure of the girls’ mother (Beth Grant), who looms over every moment of the film but is only seen on video tapes from her days as an environmental activist working to preserve the lake.  On a lark, Annie, Isa, and June perform an invocation for the seven sisters that they remember as an urban legend from their childhood and soon after begin experiencing uncanny events. Could it be that they’ve awakened the spirits of the lake? Or maybe their mother, an experienced diver who vanished without a trace while scuba diving, has somehow returned? 

This is a found footage film in that everything in the film is presented from the POV of a camera held (in all but a few spooky situations) by one of the characters, but it doesn’t follow the usual grammar of a found footage horror film. There are no jump scares and no frantic moments of terror played directly to the camera. When we hear a mysterious sound off camera, it’s just a bird that died by flying into a window, an experience that doesn’t seem too alarming until it happens again. The found footage element isn’t used as a way to insert us as viewers into a frightful situation, but rather to draw us closer to the emotional bond of this family and to make us see the events of the film through the eyes of its most distant character.

The Midnight Swim is very much an outlier when it comes to supernatural found footage movies. It’s much more interested in raising questions and complications than in providing answers and its scares come from a more existential place. Sometimes it might feel as murky and unfathomable as the allegedly bottomless lake at its center, but that’s appropriate for a movie that manages to be both intimate and distant at the same time, like the breath of a ghost on the back of your neck.