Night Swim

Night Swim is another feature-length horror that began life as a short film. Whereas the likes of The Babadook, Terrifier and, most recently, Smile succeeded in expanding upon their premises for a longer runtime, this latest Blumhouse production struggles to turn its evil swimming pool angle into a compelling concept. The result is an over-written outing that fails to make much of a splash on the big screen.

Helmed by Bryce McGuire and co-written by Rod Blackhurst (the same duo behind the 2014 short of the same name), this movie sees the Waller family move into a quaint suburban home only to discover that the swimming pool on the property is haunted. It causes those who swim in it alone to see things that aren’t there, monstrous apparitions reach out from the drain to grab their would-be victims (with one scene drawing parallels with the opening scene from IT), and the husband (Wyatt Russell) starts to develop an unhinged obsession with the water after it appears to cure him of his progressing MS, the disease that cut his promising baseball career short. Meanwhile, wife Eve (The Banshees of Inisherin’s Kerry Condon) searches for the truth behind the supernatural happenings before they can destroy her family.

It’s a standard horror formula, however, the film spends too long on extraneous scares and plot points rather than developing its main ideas. By the time the mother finally begins her investigation into the truth about the pool’s evil origins with a scene that includes some hammy exposition, the script is already rushing towards its end. When the credits roll, Night Swim doesn’t accomplish much more than cobbling together a series of underwhelming jump scares. Moreover, the lacklustre CGI effects don’t make the pool much scarier when the terrors lurking below the surface appear onscreen. The only thing keeping this film afloat are Russell and Condon’s committed performances.

The original short was a three-minute scene, which offered no reasoning for its ghostly happenings. By replacing the short’s mystery with ridiculous explanations and further diluting the premise with bloated plot points and contrived scares, Night Swim never quite succeeds in making swimming pools scary.

Andrew Murray

Night Swim is released nationwide on 5^th January 2024.

Watch the trailer for Night Swim here: