Night Swim (2024)

Directed & Written by Bryce McGuire

Last year, right about this time, Blumhouse released a movie about a little killer animatronic friend called Megan. Surprisingly, I liked Megan quite a bit for a January release of a movie featuring a killer doll doing TikTok dances, a fact that encouraged me to see the new Blumhouse/Atomic Robot collaboration, Night Swim. The trailer didn’t tell me too much about Night Swim, just that someone swims at night, and if you couldn’t figure that out from the title, then you may need more help than I can give, but I was trying to keep an open mind and hope that just maybe a magical repeat would happen and Blumhouse would be back on top after that mind-blowingly bad conclusion to the new Halloween trilogy. I summoned all of my hopes and decided to dive into Night Swim. (You know I had to get at least one water pun in there.)

With those hopes in mind, I walked into the theater and found myself experiencing what may possibly be the worst horror movie of 2024. That’s a bold statement, especially for a movie that came out in the first week of 2024, but Night Swim has that perfect blend of badness that sucks all the life of a movie that could have been decent. But before I go on a tangent, let’s talk about Night Swim’s plot. Following his diagnosis with MS and departure from professional baseball, Mark Waller moves out to the suburbs with his family, who all fall in love with a house that has a *dun dun duuuuun* pool. Unbeknownst to the Waller family, the pool is haunted (sort of, it gets kind of complicated) and the pool works its vile magics on the family, making them see things above the surface of the water while they’re underwater! Okay, that one is kind of lower on the vile magic scale, but this evil pool loves doing it and repeats it ad nauseam. At the same time, the pool begins to exert its influence on Mark, twisting him to its own designs.

Before I get into any more of the story, I need to talk about the premise here, because this is a tough one. The movie is about a haunted pool. It’s about a magical haunted pool, spoilers. That’s goofy, it just is. It’s a real shame no one sat this guy down and explained to him that pools aren’t scary, at least not in this way. It’s funny, pools are scary because they’re one of the most dangerous places at a house, but none of that has to do with any kind of haunting or magic, it’s just because they’re bodies of water that don’t have lifeguards and you could easily drown in them. More than 2,000 people drown in swimming pools annually, and none of this matters at all because the visual of a well-lit swimming pool behind a suburban house is not and never will be scary. And before you say anything, yes, I know that traditionally non-scary things can be made scary, but that is difficult and should not be done in someone’s directorial debut, which Night Swim is.

When trying to describe what doesn’t work about Night Swim, it is tempting to say everything and end the review right here, but I’ll try to be a little more specific. Aside from the premise being difficult to work with, the main issue with Night Swim is the characters, when you get past the stock nature of the cast (concerned mom, dad who longs for his youth, siblings who fight) there isn’t anything below the surface. Even the dad having MS isn’t explored in any way that’s interesting, it exists solely as a plot device without exploring his mindset at all. If this were a story or atmosphere-driven movie that might not be a huge problem but when you don’t have any reason to care about the cast, then who cares what happens to them? It sure isn’t helped by the movie not solidifying a main character and instead switching between everyone, making sure that we don’t spend enough time with any single person to learn anything about them.

Aside from the atmosphere, story, characters, and cinematography, there is one thing Night Swim does correctly that I’ll recognize; it has decent performances. Even though they’re in service of an incredibly bland script, the cast here is pretty good, including the bit players who only show up for a few scenes. These people all wanted to make a good movie and gave their all, which I appreciate, even if the end result isn’t what they had in mind. I’d be curious to see what some of these actors could do with a decent script, maybe I should check out some other movies they were in. Other than that, there isn’t much I can say that’s positive.

It feels shitty to have the first review of a new year be so harsh but, I also can’t sugarcoat this. Night Swim is destined to be another forgettable January release that will hopefully serve as a learning experience for director Bryce McGuire so he can make bigger and better movies in the future. I did a small amount of research on him and found an interview about making Night Swim where he talked about some of the inspiration for this film, which sounded like a pretty good premise for a movie. Hopefully, we will see more from him along those lines moving forward. Unfortunately, what we have in the present is a goofy horror flick with no atmosphere, bizarre mythology, and a completely unearned ending that’s both silly and downbeat simultaneously. Also, a cat dies in Night Swim so fuck this movie. Here’s to a brighter 2024!