Night Swim (2024) – Sinking Feeling

Released: 4th January
Seen: 16th January

A big discussion that’s been going on lately concerns film length, how films nowadays seem unable to be under 2 hours and how a lot of films that go for 3 hours or more don’t really need to waste that amount of audience time. What this whole issue comes down to is the idea that certain stories only really need a certain amount of time to tell them properly, Some films need 3 hours to explore every little crevice of their story, others can handle the story in 90 minutes. Then there are short films that often prove how effective they can be with only a couple of minutes, there’s even an entire channel dedicated to films that only last for 5 seconds long because that’s all they need to get the job done… Night Swim is one of those films that probably should’ve stuck to being a short 4-minute film instead of trying to take its general idea and stretch it forcibly into 100 minutes.

Night Swim introduces us to the Waller family who have just moved to a new house, one that they can make more accessible for the patriarch of the family. Ray Walker (Wyatt Russell) has been diagnosed with MS and needs to live in a home that’s easily accessible for him and so he and his wife Eve (Kerry Condon) buy a small house in the suburbs that also has a big pool in the background, something that could be handy for Ray’s physical therapy and also be fun for their kids Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle) and Elliot (Gavin Warren). However there seems to be something strange going on with the pool, almost like it might be haunted or evil in some way and it ends up causing all kinds of horrors like almost drowning someone, almost drowning someone else and even almost thinking about maybe drowning someone else because this film has nothing else to offer except maybe almost drowning people.

Do you remember that famous scene from the movie Jaws where a young woman goes swimming in a seemingly endless ocean and then starts screaming about something biting her leg before she’s dragged underneath and you realise she’s been killed by something you can’t see? Imagine that scene repeated about a half dozen times, remove any sense of narrative tension or suspense and have her live every single fucking time… congrats, you basically have Night Swim. A film built on a simple idea that repeats that idea over and over again, bashing you over the head with it until you submit because it doesn’t have any other grand scares to offer. The water’s not going to do anything interesting, people are going to kind of almost drown every 20 minutes or so and we’re going to pretend it’s scary because of the loud noises playing on the soundtrack.

Part of Night Swim’s problem is that it’s a goofy fucking concept but no one seems to understand just how goofy this is. It’s a film about a pool that kills people, specifically a specific cursed body of water that appears to have the ability to possess people and move around on its own… that’s absolutely goddamn stupid, the film acts like it’s trying to be the goddamn Poltergeist movie. The film has so many moments that should almost be played for laughs, like the dramatic moment when the pool cover seemingly comes alive to cover the pool and keep someone in there. That idea is so stupid it should be fun, but this film wants it to be a dark terrifying moment and so there’s no levity to it. 

One of the moments that really feels like someone was trying to make a joke but failed miserably is the random choice to name the high school in the film after Harold Holt. For those who don’t want to google, Harold Holt was an Australian prime minister who is mostly famous because he went swimming one day and was never seen again, presumed drowned. He’s one of the few Australian Prime Ministers to die in the top job and, as a somewhat twisted joke, there’s a swimming pool named the Harold Holt Memorial Pool somewhere in Melbourne… WHY THE HELL IS A FILM SET IN AMERICA NAMING A SCHOOL AFTER HAROLD HOLT? It’s the kind of thing that’s clearly meant as a dark joke but it doesn’t work, it’s an unrelated name-drop that doesn’t even approach the dark twisted comedy of reality. 

Sadly, Night Swim isn’t going to lean into those jokes or the fun of it, it’s going to play absolutely everything as dead seriously as it can. Sure, it’s goofy as hell to have a glass of water slowly edge itself off a table but don’t tell Night Swim that because Night Swim thinks that’s some scary shit. Sure, it’s objectively funny to have an entire scene dedicated to how scary cleaning a pool could be but apparently Night Swim thinks it’s a dramatic masterpiece. If you were to describe every scene as it happens with no inflection whatsoever, there is no doubt in my mind that it would sound like an insanely stupid comedy but it’s not, this film would love nothing more than to be considered a seriously dark horror classic but that’s just not going to happen because it isn’t good.

If you can get past the shoddy tonal issues and the forced serious take on a goofy concept, what you end up with is just a bland wannabe jumpscare fest with a slightly unique setting (I mean, I haven’t seen many films set almost entirely in backyard swimming pools but that’s probably for a reason) and a bunch of strobe lights thrown in every now and then for good measure. There’s no real tension to make the jumpscares work, no real stakes that seem to be that impactful and nothing visually worth looking at. No one wants to stare at a blank void with someone swimming in it for long periods of time, but apparently, Night Swim loves that motif so it will use it until the end of time.

Night Swim shows what happens when you stretch a concept long past the time it needs to work. Turns out that taking a 5-minute idea and fluffing it up to fill 100 minutes leaves you with roughly 95 minutes of bullshit around a single scene that almost works (which is why it was the focus of the main trailer for this film). It’s just not the kind of idea that could sustain a feature film unless you were willing to embrace the silliness of the idea and apparently no one here wanted to go there. You can make a horror film about absolutely anything but some ideas are so obviously stupid you might want to just lean into that stupidity in order to have something that works… Killer Swimming Pool is just too stupid an idea to work if you do it dead seriously, Night Swim proves that in every possible way.