Night Swim

Director: Bryce McGuire (USA, UK, Australia). Year of Release: 2024

The Twin Cities, Summer 1992. A young girl senses something in the swimming pool outside. She checks in on her sick brother in the next room, then pads outside in her pyjamas and slippers shaped as bunnies. She sees a toy boat in the pool, and as she tries to retrieve it, something appears to be pulling her in. The pool lights flicker. She slips into the water and descends towards the bottom of the pool. As a single bunny slipper rises to the surface, we see no more of the girl.

Several years later, the Waller family is looking for a new house, and not for the first time. Ray is a baseball player, who has to move cities every time he signs for a new club. This time the reasons for the move are different. Ray has contracted a degenerative illness and can no longer walk without a crutch. His wife Eve hopes that this will be their last move, and that finally their kids Izzy and Elliot will have a stable place to grow up and make friends who they still know in a year’s time.

After visiting one house, Eve is transfixed by another one which they pass while they are driving. The family is especially attracted by the house’s large swimming pool – Ray is taking water therapy to try to recover, and swimming every day would help with this. Because the scriptwriter has made Ray a retired baseball star who grew up poor, and not one of the pampered rich, we do not automatically hate him and his family when we see the size of their house.

At first the pool does have a therapeutic effect. Ray starts to recover at a speed which his doctor has never previously experienced. When he removes the bandages from a cut on his hand, all scars have mysteriously disappeared. When Ray agrees to help out with Elliot’s little league baseball team, of course they ask him to show what he can do. He starts off a little rusty, but when the third ball arrives, he whacks it out of the ground, breaking the ground’s floodlights.

But something weird is happening. At different times when they go swimming, Eve, Elliott, and Izzy encounter people who are not there – first Ray, who is tucked up in bed at the time – then the voice of Rebecca, the girl who we saw in the opening scene. Just like Rebecca, family members see something floating in the water and are subsequently pulled into the pool dragged towards the bottom of the pool. You feel a breath away from a serious accident.

If this happened to you, you’d shut down the pool, right? But you are not performing in a halfarse B-movie. A new cover is put over the pool, but Ray keeps up with his swimming therapy, and it’s not long before he is inviting the whole neighourhood round for a pool party. What better way of getting to know the neighbours than introducing them to the evil spirit lurking at the bottom of your pool?

A propos halfarse B-movies. Message to Kerry Condon. We last saw you in the Banshees of Inisherin stealing scenes from Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell. Is it so difficult for women to find a decent role in Hollywood nowadays? Or do you really need to find a new agent? Condon is perfectly fine as Eve, but surely she has shown that her acting ability is a little bit better than “perfectly fine”.

Back to the film. It perfectly fine for a film to have its own internal logic, but by the time it enters its second half, Night Swim makes no sense at all, whoever’s logic you use. What are those strange figures which appear at the bottom of the swimming pool? How is a glass of drinking water also inhabited by the evil spirit? Why does at one point the pool become as deep as a lake? The lack of sufficient exposition means that we get the feeling that things happen just because they happen.

Perhaps the key inconsistency lies in the danger near the filter at the bottom of the pool. Sometimes it emits a dark liquid. Other times, people’s limbs are attracted and disfigured. But for most of the time, nothing at all happens, as if the beastly spirit beneath the pool were on flexitime. This allows for a whole host of tension-building scenes where we see people swimming and absolutely nothing happen, but means that the attacks which do take place seem so random.

It is also unclear what the film’s message is supposed to be. Stay away from the water? Don’t be too selfish? Now not every film needs a message, but without one you can find yourself asking, just what is the point of all this? You can dismiss this as just being a horror film, but this would require a certain arrogant disdain to horror films, the best of which are more than capable of engaging with the world and making a coherent statement.

By the end of the film it has turned into something else entirely – a fable about the danger of letting your personal ambition overtake your responsibility for your loved ones, But this requires so much change in the characters’ personalities that the plot development can only be explained by the sinister influence of a mysterious pond spirit which has never been fully accounted for. Dramatic tension is lost by you thinking “but this just doesn’t make any sense”.

Maybe the ultimate problem is that Night Swim just isn’t silly enough. The unbelievable plot and schlocky effects may have worked in a film which didn’t take itself quite so seriously. At first, the acting is solid, and the Wallers are well-rounded, sympathetic characters. The first half of the film works as an interesting drama of what happens to a baseball player loses his ability to do the only thing he knows. But as the film goes on, there are few surprizes or laughs and all bets are off.