Horror Movie Review: Night Swim (2024)

It’s rare that a horror short can be turned into a compelling, frightening, and memorable full-length feature, and Night Swim continues the trend of extremely lacklustre attempts.

The basic concept, about a haunted pool, doesn’t exactly scream full-length either, and across 98 minutes, writer and director Bryce McGuire sets out to prove just how bad of an idea it was. As basic as it comes, filled with laughable trope after laughable trope, and even making a mockery of its title (a lot of this film takes place in broad daylight), the first few minutes alone will have most groaning.

A young girl is woken one night by the sound of a toy boat in her family pool. It belongs to her terminally ill brother, so she wants to retrieve it. A totally normal thing for a child to do in the middle of the night. Of course, she ends up falling in the pool, where something unseen pulls her under the water, never to be seen again.

It’s as flat and uninteresting as it sounds, and while the rest of the movie has been a set a very low bar to surpass, what follows still struggles to top it.

Many years later, Ray (Wyatt Russell) and Eve Waller (Kerry Condon) are house hunting with their kids, Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle) and Elliot (Gavin Warren). Ray was a big baseball star but has been forced to retire early as he has multiple sclerosis (MS), so finding the perfect place for the family to deal with his condition is important.

You’re never going to believe this, but guess what house they buy? One that is on the market at a steal and has a pool that Ray can use as water therapy!

Of course, the entire family start to experience spooky shenanigans surrounding the pool, with the most effective one being the one we all saw in the trailer. Which, when you consider it’s about as scary as the shallow end of a pool, isn’t saying much at all.

The rest of the film limps its way through a story that sees Ray start to miraculously heal and become dependent on the water, Eve dig into the pool’s past, and Elliot suspect that it is haunted. Izzy is also here, but aside from the night swim scare, she’s not important to events that follow.

It’s not completely the fault of the actors that their characters are so unmemorable, even if no-one seems to be trying here. It’s the writing, and the lazy attempts to create some form of connection by doing the bare minimum. Halfway through the film, you might find yourself struggling to remember their names. It really is that bad.

Which means there is no affection for them or concern for their situation. It is far to difficult to care about any aspect of their familial life or the threat they face from the haunted pool.

To cap off this dull watching experience, Night Swim massively drops the ball when it comes to horror. Obsessed with uninspired jump scares and completely failing to create tension at any stage, it staggers from boring set-piece to boring set-piece. All via the medium of a laughably bad concept.

It’s a failure of a horror experience, and while it might not be an objectively terrible film, it deserves scorn because of how little effort was put in.