Night Swim Review

Night Swim is the first cinematic horror film of 2024, taking the traditional January horror slot. This film sees a family who are haunted by a malicious swimming film.

The Waller family move to Minnesota due to the family patriarch; Ray (Wyatt Russell) being forced to retire from professional baseball. They seem to have found the perfect home at a reasonable price, a villa with a swimming pool. Ray’s condition improves due to his swimming regime but the rest of the family have strange experiences with the swimming pool.

Night Swim was based on a four-minute short that was expanded into a feature film. This was nothing new in the horror genre: films like The Evil Dead, Saw, and Smile were all based on short films. However, expanding on Night Swim was a bad idea. The 2014 short was a simple ghost story that did not have much material to expand into a feature film but it was done anyway.

Night Swim had two major problems, a ridiculous premise and cliched storytelling. The film was about a haunted swimming pool and the film treated this idea seriously. The filmmakers tried desperately to make the swimming pool sinister with it playing mind tricks on the Waller family as they saw villains and tried to manipulate them into the water. The problem could have been solved if the Wallers filled the swimming pool with concrete.

The reason the film gives was the swimming pool was connected to natural spring water and the area the Wallers moved to used to have lots of spas. The Pool Tech (Ben Sinclair) even states that the water from the pool was linked to groundwater. This led to a problem since it would have meant all the water in the area was affected and everyone would have been using the same water for drinking and bathing and would have been the source for all plants. It was a big logical hole that the film couldn’t escape from.

The idea of the water being dangerous and supernatural ended up making Night Swim similar to the Doctor Who episode “Waters of Mars” and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening. “Waters of Mars” also had a plot where humans are turned into zombies when they come across contaminated water as they try to colonise Mars. Doctor Who can get away with this story since it was sci-fi fantasy. The Happening was infamous for being a film where plants released a toxin that made people commit suicide and tried to make the wind scary.

The filmmakers had to use several horror clichés. There were elements of Poltergeist and The Shining where a family moves to a new home with an unsettling history and has a disturbing effect on them. Ray ended up being like Jack in The Shining (from the book and miniseries versions) since he was a good man who became corrupted and ended up attacking his family. One member of the family had to research the previous home’s occupants and discover the troubling history which was like The Boogeyman, Smile and It Follows which made Night Swim have an overly familiar feel. Night Swim even had an animal in peril which evoked memories of Drag Me to Hell and Hatching. The moment with the animal caused the biggest reaction in my screening

Night Swim was rated a 15 in the UK but had PG-13 in the US. It wasn’t a particularly violent film and, in the trailer, it seemed to cut a bit of swearing when Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle) was playing Marco Polo. The theatrical cut also seemed to have this moment of swearing awkwardly removed. It was annoying and led to thoughts of have the swearing or don’t have the swearing, don’t pussy foot around it.

Night Swim was that it had suffered from being an overly serious film with a silly premise and derivative storytelling, making it a forgettable horror film.