Night Swim Review: Time To Get Out Of The Pool

The first wide-release movie of January 2024 is here, and it's exactly what you'd think when you hear the phrase "January movie." Sure, there have been some challenges in recent years to the idea of January as a throwaway period for crappy projects. 2023's first movie of the year, "M3GAN," was better than it had any right to be, with big laughs, topically relevant ideas about artificial intelligence, and an instantly iconic new horror villain. The haunted pool movie "Night Swim" comes from the same producing team of Jason Blum's Blumhouse and James Wan's Atomic Monster, so perhaps there was reason to hope they could transform January from the dumping ground month to the campy fun horror month. Alas, "Night Swim" is not any good, and not even "so bad, it's good."

"Night Swim" is writer-director Bryce McGuire's feature-length adaptation of the short film of the same title he made in 2014 with Rod Blackhurst. The short, which you can find on YouTube, is fine for what it is — a three-minute directing reel based on a single mildly creepy visual idea. What it's not is a rich story that needed to be expanded to an hour and a half. The feature-length "Night Swim" isn't just 90 minutes of asking "What if a pool was haunted?" but it doesn't really have much happening on top of that, and what little else there is turns out to be pretty weak.

So what else is there to the premise of "Night Swim" beyond "What if a pool was haunted?" Well, it also asks "What if a pool cured multiple sclerosis and made you amazing at baseball?" Ray Waller (Wyatt Russell), the patriarch of the family moving into the house with the haunted pool, was a professional baseball player before being diagnosed with MS. Presumably curing his disease returns him to a prior state of amazingness, but I wonder if the pool added some extra supernatural skill. The one scene we see of him at bat post-spooky magic (one of the only scenes in the movie that's not centered around the pool) makes him come across as basically a "Twilight" vampire.

Ray loves the pool, attributing his healing to the benefits of "water therapy." His wife Eve (Kerry Condon, slumming it post-Oscar nomination for "The Banshees of Inisherin") and kids Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle) and Elliot (Gavin Warren) are a bit warier of the signs this pool is bad news. Any way you could expect to see a ghost depicted in a horror movie — regular person but see-through, elaborate skeleton makeup, hideous blob of CG particle effects — you'll see in the haunted swimming spot at some point.

What you won't see is much creativity in how these ghosts kill people. It's a limited premise already, given there are only so many ways you can kill people using a pool as your weapon of choice, but there's zero excitement just seeing people being tempted by objects in the pool and then pulled underwater. Horror movies don't need gore to be effective, but when the material is this flat and lacks any convincing psychological terror, not even getting the shallow pleasures of cinematic violence makes this a nothingburger of a movie. If the reasoning behind making "Night Swim" PG-13 was to appeal to kids the way "M3GAN" did, it would help if the child characters here had any interesting traits whatsoever: the extent of their characterization is that Elliot's lonely, Izzy's boy-crazy, both siblings are jerks to each other, and neither is remotely worth caring about.

The first two acts of "Night Swim" are driven by things happening to the characters, not by the characters actively doing things. An hour into the film, Eve finally takes a proactive stance in investigating what the hell is happening with this haunted pool, and it's here we get hints as to what a better version of this movie could look like. The sequence where Eve finally learns of the pool's secret past from a former resident of the house is the one point where things finally tip into genuine creepiness — not because of the backstory itself (which is incredibly silly), but because there's some actual drama involving choices being made and consequences being felt.

You can sort of see how the conflicts expressed in this confrontation are meant to carry over into Ray's story and its big climax, but in execution, it doesn't work well. I never bought that Ray was actually making any decisions as the haunted pool both gifted and cursed him. And forget about finding any real-life resonance in this story — this is simply the laziest "be careful what you wish for" story this side of "Wonder Woman 1984."

The best I can say about "Night Swim" is that there are traces of a better movie in there, and as bad movies go, it's not offensively bad. A few campier moments, such as a cleaning guy waxing philosophical about humans evolving out of the water or Elliot's weirdly earnest assessment of the pool's morality, gave me brief chuckles, some of which might have even been intentional. Mostly, though, I was bored. You can safely skip this. Who wants to go to the pool in January?

"Night Swim" opens in theaters on January 5.