Night Swim is a 2024 Blumhouse and Atomic Monster release, written and directed by Bryce McGuire and starring Wyatt Russell, Kerry Condon, Amelie Hoeferle, and Gavin Warren. The story follows a former major league baseball player who’s been diagnosed with MS (Russell) as he and his family move to a new place in hopes of setting down more permanent roots and treat his condition. They decide on a house with a pool that will be fun for the whole family and good PT for the father as he tries to treat his condition and keep his mobility. Unfortunately for them, their pool is filled with natural water from a spring nearby the property and the spring itself is magical, or haunted, whatever way you want to look at it. This story had some stuff working for it and some stuff that simply didn’t have the impact it should’ve had or that they were intending for I’m sure.
This film is a full-length adaptation of a short film by McGuire with the same name that he developed in 2014 and is the first full length feature by the director in general. I appreciated the family dynamic in this movie, it was believable, and every actor played their role as well as the script made possible, from the dad and mom to the daughter and son. You felt the family struggles from every avenue, the dad dealing with his illness and trying to adjust to being the stay-at-home father while not being able to fully give up on his dreams of getting back to the MLB, the mom dealing with her husband’s illness and trying to juggle that with being the main financial provider for the family now, the daughter for trying to live up to the dad’s potential and be the strong one when needed, and the son for feeling like he isn’t as loved or athletically inclined as his sister or as his dad would hope. Their relationships with each other were the most fleshed out and defined part of the movie and did a good job at helping you understand the family’s dynamic with one another. Where this film kind of loses some points is in the actual formula itself, everything felt kind of cut and dry and predictable at times. There wasn’t much here that shocked me or took me by surprise and the cookie cutter formula way of storytelling they used is something I’ve seen in many horror films before this one, leading me to expect or guess some things before they played out.
There was no shortage of cool visuals inside the actual pool itself though, where a majority of the horror elements took place, and that added a level of tension and fear to the story. My favorites were probably the moments the characters were underwater and saw a figure on the side of the pool that looked or sounded like someone they knew but when they came above water…no one was there. This was also on the shorter side, length wise, for films of the modern day, running just over an hour and a half and that really worked in the favor of the story here. Any longer and this movie would’ve felt like it was being drug out for the sake of being drug out, there were times I felt that this concept was running thin anyways or like they were adding extra, almost unnecessary, plot points to thicken the story and reach the desired runtime. Maybe that’s because I had in the back of my head that this was originally a short film adapted into feature length, but at times this movie felt longer than an hour and a half and I could tell by the restlessness of the audience around me at the theater that I wasn’t the only one to think that. One last thing that kind of struck me as weird is that this was a horror movie centered around a cursed swimming pool, and it came out in January? Seems like this would’ve fit better as a summer release, but I know studios typically dump their more under the radar releases within the first couple months of the year generally and save their big budget blockbuster releases for the summer or around the holiday season. Overall, this was a passably good horror movie and taking into account that this was Bryce’s directorial debut, and it was made on a pretty slim budget I would chalk this up to a success for him and the studio. I’m not sure it’s going to make much money outside of the typical horror movie going audience or be talked about or remembered for long within this year’s releases, but I was kept pretty interested and overall enjoyed my theater going experience.
