In Night Swim, Ray and Eve Waller move into a new house with their two children, Izzy and Elliot. The house is a bit of a fixer-upper, but it’s close to the school and it comes with a swimming pool in the backyard.
The pool is something which Ray is very keen on. Ray is a baseball player, who is currently in recovery following an injury, and he believes swimming will be a good form of exercise to get him back in shape.
When the pool maintenance man comes to inspect the pool, he informs the Wallers it is connected to a local underground spring. This essentially keeps the pool self-sustaining and as Ray soon discovers, it appears to give the water healing properties.
The more time Ray spends in the pool, the more his condition improves. However, this improvement comes at a cost, and soon he displays worrying behaviour.
Directed by Bryce McGuire, and based on a 2014 short of the same name co-written by McGuire and Rod Blackhurst, Night Swim is a supernatural horror movie starring Wyatt Russell and Kerry Condon. The film made its debut in cinemas back in January, but if you didn’t manage to catch it on the big screen, Night Swim is now available to stream on video-on-demand platforms in the UK and the US.
Set out like a cross between an episode of The X-Files and a Stephen King novel, the basic premise of Night Swim is fairly intriguing. The idea of a sinister swimming pool existing in the backyard of a suburban house provides plenty of scope for some frights, and the idea that Ray physically benefits from the water is a neat hook too.
But unfortunately, Night Swim doesn’t capitalise on these ideas and after setting up its stall, it quickly descends into a fairly bland ghost story. A ghost story which is neither scary nor suspenseful, and one which is robbed of any shock value as soon as the spooky entity is seen on screen.
What also doesn’t help the movie is Ray’s journey from injured sportsman to water-dependent nut-job is half-baked at best. Ray becomes unhinged after one too many dips in the pool, but this aspect of the film takes too long to get going, then ends far too quickly once he goes a bit crazy.
Where Night Swim works best is in some of the pool shots, which at least create the right atmosphere, and in the cast, who are all perfectly fine. No one is outstanding, but this says more about the material than it does about the performances, and everyone does exactly what they are asked to do.
Had Wyatt Russell been given more room to explore Ray’s descent into madness, I’m sure he could have done a lot more with it. As it stands, he can only do so much.
The same can be said for everyone else. The potential is there for a really strong family horror, but every actor is given the bare minimum to do and nothing more.
While Night Swim isn’t terrible, it’s not great either. The film never moves beyond basic level storytelling, and it runs out of steam pretty quickly.
In essence, it’s the sort of thing you’d see in an episode of classic children’s horror show, Are You Afraid of the Dark?. And while this might be fine if it were a ’90s television show, this is simply not good enough for a horror film in 2024.
Night Swim is mid-level horror that should be better. The ingredients are all there, but it fails to make a splash.
__
__
Thank you for taking the time to read this review on It’s A Stampede!. For more reviews, check out the recommended reads below.
It's A Stampede! 
Leave a comment