Night Swim Review | Like Diving Into an Empty Pool

Night Swim, the first major studio release for 2024, sets the bar pathetically low for the year to come. It’s not out of the ordinary for any given year to kick off with a low budget horror movie, but few of them have been as irredeemably awful and as much of a chore to sit through as Night Swim, director and co-writer Bryce McGuire’s feature length adaptation of their own short. A premise so thin, clunky, humourless, and devoid of genuine scares that it boggles the imagination, Night Swim has only one thing going for it, and it isn’t nearly enough to make up for all else that’s wrong with it.

The Waller family is in the market for a new house, one where patriarch Ray (Wyatt Russell), a former professional baseball player recently diagnosed with MS, can recover and rest. They settle upon a nice place that just so happens to have a large pool in the backyard; one that’s connected to a natural spring rather than the town water supply. At first, everyone loves the pool, especially Ray, who seems to be making some sort of miraculous recovery with every swim. But it doesn’t take long for the kids (Gavin Warren and Amélie Hoeferle) and mom (Kerry Condon) to realize there’s something evil lurking in the deep end.

The biggest and most glaring problem with Night Swim is that the pool itself isn’t scary, and there’s nothing in McGuire and co-writer Rob Blackhurst’s bag of tricks that can prove otherwise. Night Swim – produced in part by horror mavens James Wan and Jason Blum, both of whom should know better than to put their names on this thing – is the definition of a short that should never have been blown up to feature length. The more mythology gets added onto the story, and the more it tries to explain everything away, the more questions are raised that suck all the fun out of the endeavour and the less frightening everything feels. It’s one thing to have a short film about someone going for a swim getting jump-scared to their doom. It’s another entirely to drag that premise out to an interminable, repetitive, audience insulting ninety minutes that manages to feel like twice that length.

There’s no style, humour, or suspense to be found in McGuire’s direction. The cinematography is woozy and unassured. The tone is listless. The CGI enhancements are laughably obvious. The pool is such a static, unchanging location, where only a handful of things could actually happen, that every set piece is like watching paint drying with an occasional, unsuccessful jump scare peppered in every once in awhile. The title also holds almost no bearing, as at least half of Night Swim takes place in broad daylight. The evil the pool possesses knows no set time schedule, and it can inexplicably control lights and take ahold of things nowhere near it, so all the viewer can think about is how all of this is supposed to work, and why McGuire’s direction is so relentlessly serious about such a goofy premise.

It’s a massive miscalculation on McGuire’s part to think Night Swim holds any shock value at all, and there’s almost no room for campy, gory, or psychologically interesting fun. It’s reminiscent and derivative of so many horrors built around spooky, cursed objects to a point where Night Swim staunchly refuses to carve out any kind of unique, novel, or even self-aware identity. It’s a film where everyone involved in its production cynically thought the bargain basement bare minimum was enough and left it at that. When your horror picture makes some of the ludicrous, similarly themed, and lesser Amityville sequels look like genre classics, you are in big, big trouble.

But through it all, Russell is trying his absolute hardest to imbue some degree of fun into Night Swim. Whether or not Russell knows he’s in a dud is beside the point, because he at least understands the level Night Swim is supposed to be pitched at, and despite McGuire’s ability to make everything lethargic. Russell is not above going for obvious laughs and poking fun at the situation, with the film’s single best moment being a tossed off line that perfectly encapsulates the dopey nature of Night Swim. He’s fun to watch, even if the rest of Night Swim isn’t on the same level. And his performance still isn’t enough to make sitting through the thing any easier or more worthwhile.

Night Swim is now playing in theatres everywhere.