Credit to Ash, who helped me push through this & gave me the idea!
In the spirit of summer and because I’ve been living poolside for the past week and a half (sorry!), I thought I would talk about Night Swim, the Blumhouse venture about a haunted swimming pool. This movie came out in…January of this year, which is an interesting choice for a movie about an exclusively summer activity, and is notoriously awful. I didn’t see it at the time, on account of my fear of gore (I rarely see anything on opening night out of fear of gore, which shows the strength of Lisa Frankenstein because I saw that on the PREMIERE), and I wanted to see if it lived up to the underwhelming hype.
And I’m pleased to say Night Swim was even worse than I thought.
Night Swim is about Ray Waller (Wyatt Russell), a retired baseball player, and his family. Waller is suffering from a degenerative disease that prevents him from continuing his baseball career. However, he soon starts to get better after he starts having Night Swims in the pool. This is because the waters of the pool stem from (and I can’t believe I’m typing this out in the year of 2024) ancient healing springs. However, to continue to use the magic of the water, a blood sacrifice must be made…
You get the idea. This is one of the most boring movies I have ever seen in my life. It basically is just jump scares from previous people that have died in the pool, and I am generous in calling these jump scares, and the dad playing baseball and doing one of the weakest possession storylines I have ever seen. Though now that I think about it, was he possessed, or did he just not want to give up baseball again? Who knows.
Tying horror to an after school special about a dad neglecting his son, especially when the horror stems from a pool, is the definition of “choices were made” during the writing process of this film. I cannot fathom how they could make something so not scary that even I was unmoved. I’ve had bad experiences in pools, a pool is one of the only places I almost drowned as a kid. There are ways to make pools scary or at the very least, creepy. Yet all we have is family drama and a pool with a very questionable origin story. I have seen bad movies before, but I have never seen Night Swim bad. I can’t even think of one redeeming thing about this movie except that, small yay for me, there’s no gore.
But I know gore doesn’t bother a lot of you, so that might be another thing against it.
It’s not scary, it’s not gory, it’s not much of anything other than a movie that exists. I can’t say I recommend Night Swim.