Night Swim (2024) — Drowning in Disappointment
Written by Farrel Zaki (Kru 22)
I’m gonna say this from the get-go: this film is not a good one. Night Swim really went for it and dived headfirst into the murky depths of horror cliches with nothing special besides the fact that this film is about a HAUNTED SWIMMING POOL. Yeah, I get it; a swimming pool should be a place of fun. A place where your kids will probably hang there for a long time because, in a swimming pool, we basically could do anything fun to cherish joy and excitement. But now, Blumehouse came out screaming and tried to adapt Bryce McGuire’s short film from 2014 with the same title. I’ll be honest: I think the short film is okay because it did not add much context. Just some deep fear of swimming on the coldest nights, knowing that there is something scary just standing still beside the pool railing for the horror’s sake only.
The narrative follows The Waller family, led by Ray, a notable baseball player who is forced to retire by an injury (Wyatt Russell), with his anxious wife (Kerry Condon) and their 2 children (Amélie Hoeferle & Gavin Warren), who moved into a new house in some suburban area. Ray must heal his injured body while longing for a better life by spending time with his beloved family. The constant transfer and moving as a baseball player is complicated for him, so this is a perfect time to reconnect with his family (at first).
Oh, I almost forgot, their new house also has a pool (YAYYY). This is good, right? No, it isn’t. The Wallers ALSO loved to swim around. Some weird things happen while the family is swimming. Of course, you’ve got your flickering lights and creepy whispers — it’s like a checklist for generic scares. All those things happen in the pool. The point is the pool is scary and harbors dark secrets underwater.
Not only dark secrets, but the pool also somehow speeds Ray’s injured body in just a matter of days! Oh, and you know the next thing is Ray is heavily addicted to that swimming pool. He starts to reminisce about the prime-old days. While this is going on so well for Ray, his wife and the 2 children are having a nightmare in the so-called “Magic Pool”. As mentioned, the usual tropes and formula are predictable enough to set somewhat scary and unsatisfying jumpscares.
This movie’s premise holds some promise but lacks storytelling ideas with cliche horror tropes. The film feels like a retread of countless haunted-property flicks, relying on tired jump scares and predictable plot beats to deliver its horror. Exploring the depth of the history of this haunted pool has some unanswered gaps and inconsistent plot pieces that left me with loads of questions rather than answers. Also, the main star of the film — the ghost of the pool, showed up like 3 times across the 1 hour and 38 minutes runtime.
Let’s talk about the ending. I won’t go into spoiler territory here, but this is one of the worst endings in the history of horror flicks. Let’s just say the final act defies logic and human behavior in deeply unrealistic ways. This is an unfortunate moment where the characters must feel their emotion or cry at least. The characters just scream for 1 second, and in the next scene, they act like nothing wrong has happened. Also, how the characters solved this problem could be much better for the narrative and the lore of the pool itself. There is so much more potential that the film could dive into. But in the end, Night Swim just does whatever it feels like doing.
Don’t get me wrong, this movie still has some good things. The actors are decent enough with some good acting. Not only that, the pool sequences mostly tried their best to deliver a chilling atmosphere to build up the predictable horror. The last one surprised me a bit, but the characters actually have some depth that somewhat drives the narrative. However, ultimately, it’s not enough to save the film from the sinking ship.
Night Swim takes a promising premise about a haunted pool and drowns it in a sea of cliche tropes and predictable scares. The narrative stumbles on cliche storytelling, perplexing ghosts, and an unsatisfying ending to close the pool once and for all. While decent acting and scary pool sequences offer a few glimmers of hope, they’re not enough to rescue this drowning film into the abyss of disappointment.
