NIGHT SWIM movie poster | ©2024 Universal Pictures

Rating: PG-13
Stars: Wyatt Russell, Kerry Condon, Amélie Hoeferle, Gavin Warren, Jodi Long, Eddie Martinez, Elijah Roberts, Nancy Lenehan, Rahnuma Panthaky, Ayazhan Dalabayeva
Writer: Bryce McGuire, based on the short film by Rod Blackhurst & Bryce McGuire
Director: Bryce McGuire
Distributor: Universal Pictures
Release Date: January 5, 2024

In home insurance documents, swimming pools are referred to as “attractive nuisances.” The swimming pool in NIGHT SWIM is more than that, alternatively alluring, healing, and homicidal.

Directed and scripted by Bryce McGuire, who made the short film this is based on with Rod Blackhurst, NIGHT SWIM begins in 1992. A short prologue introduces us to an attractive two-story home in a Minnesota suburb (actually shot in Australia), which has a regulation-sized backyard swimming pool. We learn almost at once what the pool does, though not yet how or why.

Then we’re in the present, touring the neighborhood with the Waller family and their realtor (Nancy Lenehan). Dad Ray (Wyatt Russell) is a professional baseball player suffering from MS, but hoping that he still has some games in him. Mom Eve (Kerry Condon) is a schoolteacher who’s found a job in the district. Teen daughter Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle) has a knack for making friends, while young son Elliot (Gavin Warren) is shy.

When Ray sees the house from the prologue, it’s love at first sight. Ray’s doctor has suggested swimming as therapy, so of course the pool is a bonus. Eve, Izzy and Elliot all at first enjoy going swimming as well, but then …

There are great touches like a little girl’s bunny slippers and the slogan of the school’s Christian swim club that add pathos and humor, but once we get past the possibilities suggested by the pool, NIGHT SWIM doesn’t fully seem to know how to proceed.

A great variety of potential terrors exist in being submerged, but NIGHT SWIM doesn’t take full advantage of these. When the pool is dark (the supernatural force here has a habit of turning the lights out), we have characters who cannot see past themselves into the black water beyond, but this is almost never as scary as it should be.

There’s also an exposition dump where we wonder not only how the character explaining things can know so much in the first place, but also why they’re sharing it. The longer the film runs, the harder it is to come up with reasons as to why our main characters don’t just leave, or at least stay out of the back yard.

Russell is persuasive as a wounded athlete who really loves his family and wants to do right by them. Condon finds ways to put some new, reasonable spins on her archetypal truth-finder heroine, and Hoeferle and Warren are both solid.

NIGHT SWIM does have the distinction of being the only film in memory to inspire post-screening debates among the audience about neighborhood-wide plumbing issues. It’s intermittently entertaining, it’s just not very carefully constructed and seldom actually frightening.

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