A haunted pool terrorizes an unsuspecting suburban family in Night Swim, which opens in Prague cinemas and worldwide this weekend to kick off 2024 at the multiplex. This Blumhouse horror film from director Bryce McGuire, adapting his 2014 short film with co-writer Rod Blackhurst, plays its ridiculous premise entirely straight, which results in a film that is frequently entertaining if rarely good.
That’s a shame, because while Night Swim‘s concept of a haunted pool may not seem especially spine-tingling, there is something to the notion of being underwater, alone and at night, at catching blurred glimpses of through the water of shadowy figures by the side of the pool. You surface and dry your eyes, but there’s nothing there.
That’s something that the nifty 2014 short delivered with precision in its three-minute runtime, and something that Night Swim re-creates about four times. Four scenes of various characters swimming alone in the haunted pool and experiencing paranormal actively through the water are entirely well-crafted (the underwater cinematography is first-rate), and give the film a few genuine scares.
But those four scenes take up about 10 minutes of this 98-minute movie. The rest of Night Swim is dedicated to murky exposition as the central family comes to the realization that their pool is haunted, researches the previous owners of their home and mysterious disappearances connected to the pool, uncovers the true horrifying nature of what the pool wants, and ultimately learns how to defeat it.
Spoiler alert: you may not be entirely surprised by the film’s final shot, which involves an excavator filling in the pool. Gee… why didn’t any of the previous homeowners think of that?
“We have a pool,” remarks Ray Waller (Wyatt Russell) with a shit-eating grin during his latest physical. Ray, a former major league third baseman for the Milwaukee Brewers, has been slowly coming to terms with his multiple sclerosis diagnosis, but the water therapy in the pool at his family’s new home is doing him wonders.
“There’s something wrong with the pool!” shrieks mom Eve (Kerry Condon) after both husband Ray and a child nearly drown at a fateful pool party. Condon, following up her Oscar-nominated turn in The Banshees of Inisherin here, is impressively able to deliver lines such as these with a straight face, but members of the audience will struggle to receive them without cracking a smile.
What’s wrong with the pool? Well, the drain keeps spurting blood, there’s a grabby zombie behind the weir, and a multitude of bodies floating in what can only be described as the unknown depths beneath the pool. It’s all a bit vague, but Mrs. Summer (Jodi Long), a previous homeowner who lost her daughter to the pool in the film’s nifty opening sequence, explains everything in excruciating detail in the third act.
Night Swim probably wasn’t destined to become this year’s M3GAN, the breakout Blumhouse hit of last January, but its utterly conventional script strands some fine performances (including those by Amélie Hoeferle and Gavin Warren as the kids) and proficient horror filmmaking. And while this one doesn’t meet the low bar of pool-set movies like 12 Feet Under and 2001’s Prague-shot The Pool, as far as haunted pool movies go it’s gotta be at the top of the list.
2 Responses
I enjoyed it for what it was. No, there isn’e a lot of originality to the storyline, but the scares are there, some great practical effects, and good performances. 6/10
Unfortunately, within the genre of “original” horror, you won’t see much here and the end offers a twist that doesn’t even make sense, as in the scene with the Asian woman the water flowed into her house, so covering the pool won’t solve anything.