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Night Swim Full Movie Download
Directed by
Bryce McGuire
Screenplay by
Bryce McGuire
Story by
Bryce McGuire
Rod Blackhurst
Based on
Night Swim
by
Bryce McGuire
Rod Blackhurst
Produced by
Jason Blum
James Wan
Starring
Wyatt Russell
Kerry Condon
Cinematography
Charlie Sarroff
Edited by
Jeff McEvoy
Music by
Mark Korven
Production
companies
Blumhouse Productions
Atomic Monster
Distributed by
Universal Pictures
Release date
January 5, 2024
Running time
98 minutes[1]
Country
United States
Language
English
Budget
$15 million[2]
Box office
$54.1 million[3][4]
Night Swim Full Movie Review
Night Swim is written and directed by Bryce McGuire and it stars Wyatt Russell and Kerry Condon as a couple who move into a new house with their kids, only to discover that their pool is haunted. That’s it, that’s the premise of the first movie of 2024.
A finite body of water is haunted by a supernatural force of some sorts and what ensues is the family dealing with their… haunted swimming pool.
Right out the gate, I need to say that this is a review that’s going to feature very little in the way of positives for the movie and I might as well get the few nice things out of the way. Russell and Condon are both trying their best in the acting department.
Condon in particular breathes some life and energy into her role as the wife, but it’s still nowhere near enough to fully elevate a downright horrendous screenplay.
Russell seems to be perfectly serviceable in the first two acts, but the third act is where he’s clearly checked out. His line delivery goes flat and it’s clear that he’s phoning it in for an easy paycheck and I really can’t blame the guy. There’s not much else that the movie has going for it.
With a premise as goofy as a haunted pool, it’s hard to sell in premise alone, so you have to hope that there’s good execution. Is that the case here? Hell no. With it being a horror film, the one thing it needs to do is provide some scares and it doesn’t manage that one bit.
What the movie tries to pass as horror are jump cheap jump scares that you can see coming from a mile away. There’s potential for a horror movie to be made about the terror in something as mundane as a pool and it could maybe capitalize on something like a fear of drowning or something to that effect, but the movie instead just relies on weird ghostly imagery jumping out at you accompanied by a loud sound effect.
It’s not just that the scary scenes are predictable and lazy, but they’re also laughably bad in some scenes. There’s just the general idea of a haunted pool and the family simply having to not go near the pool in the first place, but individual scenes stand out as poorly constructed.
For example, there’s the Marco Polo scene where the girl is playing with her boyfriend and once the creepy stuff start happening, she just keeps her eyes closed and stays in the pool. Why? From a filmmaking point of view, she’s doing it because the plot needs her to, but there’s no logical reason for her to be doing that.
People in my theater were actually shouting “Just open your eyes!” at the screen and I normally hate when people yell in the theater like that, but this was one of those rare instances where I was close to joining them. This movie is filled with laughable scenes like that.
The movie’s attempt at an actual store comes in the form of Wyatt Russell playing a former baseball player who had to retire early because of a muscular disease and he’s tempted by the haunted pool since it provides some type of healing that makes his illness fade.
Again, there’s potential in a Monkey’s Paw “Be careful what you wish for” story device, but by the end of the film, the entire scenario is handled in an extremely convoluted manner filled with a bunch of lazy exposition that’s just dumped out all over the screen with zero trust in the audience to figure things out on their own.
The attempts at twists are painfully obvious and the reveal of the pool’s true plan (yes, that’s an actual sentence I just typed) is just ridiculous. No spoilers here, but it’s just one of those “Someone got paid to write this” moments.
Overall, Night Swim is every bit as bad as the premise would have you think. It’s not scary and there’s simply no logical decision-making by the characters when all you have to do with a haunted pool is to just avoid the damn pool.
Seriously, just chill in your house and avoid swimming and you’ll be fine. This is easily the worst movie of the year because it’s the first movie of the year, but it would still be one of the worst even if this came out later in the year and it still had other bad movies to contend with. Buckle up, folks, it’s January and we know what type of movies to expect this time of year.