Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Night Swim’ on Peacock, a Haunted Swimming Pool Movie

At least it’s an original concept: Night Swim (now streaming on Peacock) is, per my accounting at least, the first-ever haunted pool movie, and it’s surely aiming to tap into our PRIMAL FEARS about chlorine tablets and skimmers stuffed with dead bugs. The idea originates from a short film by Bryce McGuire, who adapted it into a full-length feature, his directorial debut, with neo-horror masters Jason Blum and James Wan producing. McGuire landed Wyatt Russell and Banshees of Inisherin Oscar nominee Kerry Condon to star – and then asked them to play creepy games of Marco Polo and wrestle with the world’s most diabolical pool-cover crank, respectively. If that sounds really, really, really, really, really dumb, well, that’s because it IS really, really, really, really, really dumb. 

NIGHT SWIM: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Once upon a time a little girl tried to fish her brother’s toy boat out of the pool and she fell in and was never seen again. It seems the pool ate her. Thirtyish years later, a perfectly nice family looks for a new house. Ray (Russell) is the dad and Eve (Condon) is the mom and they have a teenage daughter Izzy (Amelie Hoeferle) and a younger son Elliot (Gavin Warren). Ray is a former big-league third baseman who’s been in a tailspin since a multiple sclerosis diagnosis ended his career; the good news is, he’s no longer being traded from this team to that team and now his family can settle down in a nice house with a pool that’ll be perfect for his physical therapy and that the kids will love. Of course, that nice house with a pool is the same house-with-pool where the aforementioned little girl was swallowed up, but they don’t know that, at least not yet. They take the tour, and Ray falls in and is nearly devoured by the pool, and I think the pool even growls at him. But he ignores the bad omen and they buy it anyway and they live happily ever after the end.

No! The way this shit always works is, things seem great for a while and then they get significantly worse. The fam moves in and during Pool Clean-up Day, Ray reaches into the drain and it bites his hand and urps up many gallons of black sludge. Curious. They call a Pool Guy and the Pool Guy says something about the pool being one of the very rare pools that’s fed by an underwater spring, which trumped my theory about an Indian burial ground. It’s 2024 and you gotta get INVENTIVE with high-concept horror screenplays, I guess! Once they get the pool up and running, Ray starts doing his physical therapy in the pool and whaddayaknow, his progressive degenerative disease is actually getting better. Is it a MAGIC pool, or what? Might be!

And Then. You knew there was an And Then coming. And then Eve goes for a <TITLE OF MOVIE> and some weird things happen – lights flickering, hallucinations maybe, weird noises, etc. Then the family cat disappears and they find the cat’s collar floating in the pool. Everyone assumes the cat ran off but you know and I know that the pool ate the cat. Poor cat. Each of the kids gets a turn at being mercilessly effed with by the pool, too, in scenes suggesting that some gross-looking humanoid entity might be living in the drain and/or the skimmer. But the family has never seen even one stupid horror movie it seems, so they keep on keepin’ on, and host a pool party so they can get to know their new neighbors and the kids on Elliot’s baseball team. It goes poorly, and not because someone dropped the potato salad in the dirt. No, the pool, like, maybe, kind of possesses Ray, who does eccentric, dangerous things that can easily be blamed on his medical condition. At this point, we’re wondering how many shots of a haunted drain this movie will force upon us, and even though I didn’t count, I can affirm that it’s way, way too many.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Baby Ruth scene in Caddyshack.

Performance Worth Watching: Condon was so wonderful in Banshees that watching her recite the line “I know this is strange, but” in a moronic haunted-pool movie makes me ache down to the quarks in the atoms of my marrow.

Memorable Dialogue: “You’re SUPPOSED to say POLO!” – Ray

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: News you can use: Always, I repeat, always, fumigate your pool for drain CHUDs. I can’t stress this enough, people. If you don’t do it, you’re just asking for trouble. And should you forget, may I suggest you not do what the people in this movie fail to do, namely, not getting back into the pool? Beyond that moral, Night Swim doesn’t have much to offer. It’s yet another braindead horror concept stretched far past its ability to hold… narrative credibility. And you thought I was going to get all punny and say “water.” Let’s leave the hackiness to the makers of this movie, please.

Look beyond the movie’s nonsense plot, and its stale jump scares, and its empty characters, and its paycheck performances, and its deadly lameness, and you’ll realize McGuire never establishes anything resembling an engaging tone. It’s not funny, it’s not campy, it’s not scary, and it’s not creepy – it’s just beige, with only the slightest suggestion that we shouldn’t take any of it seriously, as if a movie about a haunted swimming pool with an evil drain and a maleficent pool-cover crank could ever be taken seriously. 

To be fair, I don’t think McGuire intentionally insists that we bear any significant psychological weight while watching a haunted pool movie, even though Ray’s painful emotional arc – baseball was his life, now he has no baseball – sure seems to reflect legit real-life struggles. Hence the disconnect. The film’s primary unforced error lies in foregoing anything resembling wit or pathos for the bland tropes of middle-of-the-pack Blumhouse horror films, of which there are, I dunno, several hundred? A million? Aren’t there decazillions of these things being released every week? Haunted Swimming Pool may be a relatively fresh concept, but its execution is washed out. Good luck dogging it through this turd. Night Swim totally puts the poo in the pool.

Our Call: I am not a swimfan of this movie. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.