NIGHT SWIM - Mark Reviews Movies

Night Swim, Universal Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 5, 2024

In case the concept of a magical killer swimming pool isn't silly enough, here's a movie that takes the idea very seriously. Most supernatural horror conceits don't need to be explained, but there are certain cases in which they absolutely shouldn't be. Night Swim is definitely one of those cases.

The story comes from a decade-old short that lasts less than three minutes without credits, so one can imagine the stretching required by writer/director Bryce McGuire (who wrote and co-directed the original) to somehow expand the concept to a feature that runs more than 90 minutes. The basics are established in an opening scene, because McGuire essentially has taken this idea and plugged it into the formulaic template of pretty much any horror movie over the past 20 years or more.

There's a suburban home with an in-ground pool in the backyard, and a young girl spots her sickly older brother's toy boat floating in the water. Obviously, she goes to retrieve it in the middle of the night, without telling anyone what she's doing, and with a couple of questions about why a kid who appears to be on his deathbed would need it in the first place.

None of that matters, because the scene simply exists to establish that there's something wrong with the pool. She's pulled into it by some invisible force. It makes her see a false image of her mother when she's underwater, and shadowy figures appear around the edges and disappear whenever the girl isn't looking through the water.

Many years after the girl apparently drowns, Ray (Wyatt Russell), his wife Eve (Kerry Condon), and their kids, teenaged Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle) and younger Elliot (Gavin Warren), are looking for a new house in the same neighborhood. Ray used to be a professional baseball player, but he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Eve has taken a job at the local school for the health insurance, and after Ray falls into the pool while reaching for an old baseball, he decides the couple should buy the house. After all, his doctor suggested that swimming would be a low-impact form of exercise to help him.

It does, surprisingly, in ways that nobody can explain. "Is the pool a help, or is it haunted," one of the kids later asks, after both siblings have had an experience similar to the one the girl in the introduction did—minus the drowning, of course. The reply is about as much depth as the script can muster: "Why can't it be both?"

We're not here for such questions or the inevitably ridiculous answers that probably should have been left unsaid, though. We're here to see whatever creepy things the pool, its ghostly inhabitants, or—why not, indeed—both have in store for this family.

Well, the movie gives us everything it has to offer in that opening scene, save for a little more detail of the spirits trapped in or hanging around the pool (Some haggard figure hangs out behind a filtration vent, and a bloated man with glowing eyes pops up for a game of Marco Polo). Meanwhile, characters are given more than one chance to almost die in the haunted pool, and for some reason, they take up the offer without bothering to mention another trip to the pool, despite the fact that everyone in the family suspects or knows the thing is haunted.

By the way, Eve figures it out because the real estate agent (played by Nancy Lenehan) who sold the family the house decides to mention that the girl died there after the sale has been completed. The dialogue in that scene might as well have come out of a guidebook for horror screenplays, and the same goes for the predictable sequence of Eve looking up the girl and the property online, traveling to speak to a former owner, and having a bunch of exposition tossed at her without much prompting. Oh, the water apparently can possess people, too, and a demonic family member saying, "You were supposed to say 'Polo,'" isn't nearly as unsettling as McGuire imagines it to be.

What, really, can be said for this? For one thing, McGuire does give the nighttime pool scenes a decent sense of atmosphere, although the predictable jump scares within and routine construction of those sequences are more obvious. It's nice to see Condon's recent career boost pay off and nicer to see her provide some grounding to such throwaway material, but a polite suggestion that her agent should do better is probably in order.

Ultimately, Night Swim feels like a copy of a copy of copy of similar horror fare. The sole twist of a haunted pool instead of a house isn't nearly enough of an excuse for such laziness, either.

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