‘Night Swim’: Review

Dir: Bryce McGuire. US. 2024. 98mins

“There’s something bad in the water, isn’t there?” Writer-director Bryce McGuire’s feature debut concerns a haunted backyard swimming pool that lures in a new family, granting one member his secret wish — for a terrible price. In its early stretches, Night Swim taps into aquaphobia and those universal childhood anxieties of a neighbourhood pool that does not seem so safe. But as the mysteries behind the strange occurrences are slowly revealed, this underpowered horror film starts to drown in cliches and predictable plot twists.

Resorts to over-familiar horror tropes

Universal will open the film in the UK and US on January 5, hoping to follow in the footsteps of another low-budget Blumhouse production, M3GAN, which launched in early January of last year and grossed a whopping $180 million worldwide. Night Swim lacks the social-media buzz that surrounded that killer-doll film, although this picture should attract genre fans starving for horror fare.

Ray (Wyatt Russell) and Eve (Kerry Condon) move into a new home with their kids Izzy (Amelie Hoeferle) and Elliot (Gavin Warren), Ray adjusting to the fact that he will probably never play professional baseball again after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The house has a pool, which Ray uses for rehab, noticing that he is getting stronger each day. But Izzy and Elliot each encounter disturbing sights while swimming, and become convinced that something ominous lies beneath its surface.

Based on a short film McGuire made in 2014, Night Swim benefits from a relatable, nerve-wracking premise, sending shivers down the spine as we watch the family take turns at getting into the pool, inevitably making their way to the deep end, unknowingly putting themselves in danger. McGuire’s screenplay initially hints at provocative societal themes — Ray wants a pool, in part, because it was something his parents were never rich enough to afford — as we get a sense of Ray and Eve’s committed marriage and the struggles they face as Ray begins to reconcile himself to a life without baseball stardom. 

After some effective scare sequences early on, however, the film starts to drift, the story requiring these bright characters to behave foolishly in order to set up later horror set pieces. (At a certain point, once the children recognise that the pool contains some malevolent force, they really ought not to be tricked into going near it again.) 

Not helping matters is that Russell gives an unconvincing performance as a man struggling to stay afloat now that he has been stripped of his identity as an athlete. As he becomes rejuvenated by the pool, believing his disease might be in remission, it becomes clear that Night Swim is a new spin on the classic ’making a deal with the devil’ narrative – yet Russell fails to make his character’s desperate desire to reconnect with his triumphant old self sufficiently poignant or compelling. By comparison, Condon remains grounded and believable as the concerned Eve, despite the increasingly risible actions her character is required to perform during the film’s second half as she seeks the truth about this cursed pool. 

Night Swim’s horror is built around jump scares rather than outright gore, and cinematographer Charlie Sarroff gives the underwater sequences a creeping unease. We are constantly aware of just how far the characters are from the edge of the pool — and, therefore, from safety. And McGuire has some fun hinting at where the terror is originating, playing on universal nervous memories of pools’ weird filters and drains; strange portals where unknown creatures might lay in wait. 

Yet, in expanding his short to feature-length, the writer-director resorts to over-familiar horror tropes, including convoluted explanations of the origins of the invisible menace, stranding his potentially interesting characters in increasingly rote suspense scenes. Ray and his family cannot resist the temptation to get into the pool, but viewers may not find the invitation nearly as enticing.