Night Swim is a classic haunted house horror, but with a twist, it’s the pool that’s possessed. The film is director Bryce McGuire’s feature debut, after directing his 2014 short film of the same name. He codirected his short alongside Rod Blackhurst who returned as a screenwriter for the feature film. Night Swim follows Ray Waller, played by Wyatt Russell, a professional baseball player forced into early retirement due to his debilitating illness. The Waller family decides to settle down in a quiet suburb where Ray can recover and their children can finally have some stability and normalcy after years of following him on the road. Their new home has a barely used, spring-fed swimming pool that is perfect for Ray’s physical therapy. To even the doctor’s surprise, Ray begins a remarkable recovery and his illness goes into remission. His wife Eve, played by Kerry Condon, grows skeptical of his sudden change which is exacerbated when strange and supernatural occurrences start to affect her nightly swim routine. 

The movie’s cold open is set in 1992 where a young girl is lured out to the pool to retrieve a toy for her sick brother. It is here that we get our first taste of the kind of monster we are dealing with. The entity is able to manipulate its victims into hearing and seeing their loved ones, a tool used to draw them in closer to the water. The little girl jumps in and successfully swims out to her brother’s toy boat. When suddenly, the pool lights flicker on and off and something bubbles just under the surface. Frantically, she pulls herself over the ledge and onto dry ground, but without the toy. The girl struggles to grab it, but it’s just out of arm’s reach when she is dragged underwater, never to be seen again. This cold open sets the stage perfectly for the kind of evil our characters are up against and gives the audience several cues to look for later in the film.

Unfortunately, this opening is the most effective scare sequence in Night Swim, meaning everything that follows pales in comparison simply by following this formula too closely. Sure there are still plenty of mysteries to uncover, including the monster’s origins and why the young girl was targeted, but ultimately the suspense is diminished by the second or third time the audience sees the pool lights flicker. 

When the Waller family moves in, the scares slow down to introduce us to their complicated family dynamic. The Wallers have two children, teen Izzy and middle schooler Elliot. Izzy is confident, easily making friends at her new school, while Elliot struggles to break out of his shell. They have a typical snarky sibling relationship, but have bonded over their transient childhood. Due to her husband’s illness, Eve is now the primary breadwinner and caretaker. The guilt of not being able to provide for his family eats at Ray, fueling his desperation for a full recovery and a grand return to baseball. A new aspect of the spirit is introduced here as Ray’s health miraculously turns around, indicating that there’s something more than cardio and mineral water at play. At last, he is feeling hopeful for the future once again and is more engaged as a parent. This drives the central conflict of the film as he gets better, the supernatural threat against his family grows stronger. The ensemble cast does a great job with what they were given, but this is the weakest aspect of the screenplay. 

Even without knowing of the 2014 short film ahead of time, it was clear that the pool set pieces were in the initial pitch, with the family story coming later as an afterthought. Night Swim banks on the pool twist to convince the audience that it is any different than the thousands of haunted house movies to come before it. The family relationships rely on tired tropes like: moving to a too good to be true steal of a house, a father who’s convinced that their lives are changing for the better and refuses to believe anything is wrong, and an isolated and eccentric child that no one believes until it is too late, among many others. The problem is that the pool does little to give the story a unique spin, aside from being the location where all of the attacks occur. With that knowledge, that the audience obtains right away and the characters learn rather quickly, you can’t help but wonder why do they keep going back in the water?

Well Dad is now completely possessed by the water demon and any attempt to stray too far away from the pool results in convulsions. Not wanting to risk his health or her family’s safety, Eve is determined to find the root cause of the monster. She meets the mother of the girl who drowned in the opening who explains to her that the entity is akin to a wishing well. It’s magic water with the ability to grant your deepest desires, but requires a sacrifice in return. This works as an explanation for me, but is hindered by how seriously Night Swim takes itself. The premise is a bit silly, but rather than leaning into that, the film whips up a half-hearted fable about the corruptibility of human desires. 

Despite its flaws, Night Swim has a lot going for it. The climatic pool party scene is a standout sequence that follows the beach scene from Jaws nearly beat for beat. Mimicking the dolly zoom shot when Elliot realizes the danger in the pool is a nice touch of reverence for the original swimming horror movie. Every shot taken underwater has a deeply unsettling liminal space quality to it. The film capitalizes on our primal fear of water and uses it to great effect, capturing the feeling that something is lurking, out of sight, deep in the abyss. It is clear that McGuire has good directorial sense and understands how to construct a horror scene. However Night Swim is severely held back by its unimaginative script filled with tired genre cliches. There’s so much potential in what Night Swim has to offer, but in execution, it fails to tread water.