Night Swim (2024)

Night Swim is a two out of five at best. It's bland, forgettable and stupid — a January horror release that met my already low expectations, and January horror does not have a great track record to begin with. Bryce McGuire directs, James Wan and Jason Blum produce, and none of that saves it.

The direction is the good part

The directing is actually pretty good, which is the frustrating thing. The first act is decently shot and builds tension in a creative way. It pays off in a kill and a jump scare you can see coming, then hits the title card — and from there the rest of the movie is just that same first act again, only worse.

The camerawork deserves real credit, especially underwater. There's a shot late in the film where the frame is upside down and the water is murky, and it looks great. Yes, it's all CGI. It's still cool. Anything that pushes a camera above and below the waterline gets a plus in my book. Those shots genuinely impressed me. It is, technically, the best film I've seen released this year, and comfortably the best film I've seen about a haunted swimming pool. That's about as far as the compliments go.

The writing is the problem

The writing is terrible. The characters barely exist — I could not name a single one of them at gunpoint. It stars Wyatt Russell and Kerry Condon, two actors I love. Russell was one of the only great things about Falcon and the Winter Soldier; Condon was excellent in The Banshees of Inisherin and Better Call Saul. Here they have nothing to do. The film is a straight waste of both of them.

Then there are the plot holes. The movie explains that the pool only needs to kill one person to satiate its hunger — one death buys one wish. Fine. Except earlier the pool just kills the family cat. No explanation, it simply happens.

The scares and the acting

The acting is flat out bad, and even Russell and Condon can't rescue a single scene. There's a moment near the end where Russell looks at a character who is visibly dying and asks if he's okay. That's the level we're operating at.

There are maybe three jump scares in the whole film and all of them are bad. I flinched once, purely because something was loud.

Story, character, acting — every level, really. It doesn't work. It's a bad movie.