How ‘Night Swim’ Goes from Enjoyably Stupid to Offensively Stupid

[Spoilers ahead for Night Swim]

If you take out the last five minutes or so of Bryce McGuire’s new horror movie, Night Swim, you have a fairly innocuous, stupidly enjoyable movie. It’s the kind of movie where you grab a beer, go to a crowded theater, and laugh at a family that’s being terrorized by their haunted swimming pool. It’s no one’s idea of a horror classic, but it aims to work on the same wavelength as last year’s M3GAN (also from production companies Atomic Monster and Blumhouse): a kind of campy, PG-13 horror that delivers laughs and thrills in equal measure. These two companies pair a high concept with a relatively low budget to make a solid opening on a slow January weekend. With M3GAN, that worked pretty well (thanks in no small part to screenwriter Akela Cooper, who also penned the delightfully demented Malignant), and while Night Swim never comes close to the highs of the creepy robot doll movie, it muddles along with its silly terrors or a haunting swimming pool.

The story concerns the Waller family moving into a new home with the haunted swimming pool (their realtor does not disclose that the child of the previous tenants died in the pool, which we see happen in the film’s prologue). Father Ray Waller (Wyatt Russell) was a major league baseball player but is now suffering from multiple sclerosis. His doctor recommends swimming as a way to treat the effects of MS, so a house with a pool seems like a good deal. His wife, Eve (Kerry Condon), and their two kids Elliot (Gavin Warren) and Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle), all want to support Ray, and things at the house seem fine at first until the pool starts getting spooky. While the pool starts making Ray stronger, ghouls start appearing to the other family members.

Up until the film’s ending, I was kind of with Night Swim even though it makes no sense. McGuire, who adapted his five-minute 2014 short of the same name, doesn’t seem too concerned with the details of how the evil swimming pool works. We’re eventually told that it has some kind of demented “wishing well” thing where it will heal people, but also demands a sacrifice in return. However, it’s never entirely clear what the limitations of evil swimming pool’s powers are. For example, we’re told that the water is the evil part, but evil swimming pool also seems to have control of things like the diving board and the underwater light. Is the diving board also evil? If the diving board can be evil, does that mean the whole patio area is evil? When Eve tries to defeat the pool by draining its water into a street drain, does that mean the evil is now at the water reclamation plant? Late in the film, when Izzy gets a glass of water, we can see that evil swimming pool can control the water inside the glass even though the glass is inside the house. Is there anything evil swimming pool can’t do?

Oddly, none of these questions bother me that much. If McGuire wants to make Poltergeist with less square footage, that’s his business. Also, evil swimming pool is a made-up thing, so I’m not really concerned if its logic is airtight. The whole film feels like McGuire really straining to make his short film into a feature and trying to use the story of the Wallers as the emotional backbone for his true passion of “jump scares involving swimming pool.” All of this is fine for what it is until it becomes clear that McGuire doesn’t really know how to end his movie, and everything goes off the rails.

[I’m going to tell you what happens at the end of the movie, so last warning: spoilers ahead]

At the climax of the film, Ray has been possessed by evil swimming pool. He’s gone full Jack Torrance and is trying to murder his daughter while the pool tries to drag Elliot under. Eve rescues Elliot (with the help of a little girl who drowned in the prologue yet somehow looks angelic and normal rather than a horrifying corpse like the rest of the pool ghouls), but Elliot still has evil pool water in him. Having broken free of evil swimming pool’s control, Ray comes to the conclusion that he must sacrifice his life for his family, which means letting the evil swimming pool take him in exchange for saving Elliot. Ray disappears into the water, Elliot lives, and in the final scene, the remaining family members fill in the swimming pool with dirt so it can’t claim another victim.

Here's the problem with all that. Ray’s character arc is set up as someone who had the world on a string by being a professional baseball player, and now he feels like he’s a burden to his family due to his MS. He wants to be a healthy, professional ballplayer again, and the evil swimming pool gives him the chance to do that even though at no point is he conscious that he’s making a bargain of his health for the health of another. The way Ray’s arc is heading, he should learn that being a healthy baseball player isn’t why his family loves him, and while they’re sacrificing for his health, he has to sacrifice his hope of getting better to adjust to a new normal. This will be difficult, but it’s better than trying to live in the past.

But where Night Swim ends up is that Ray accepts the idea that he’s a burden and his family would be better off without him. His “sacrifice” is that he kills himself to “save” his son. Keep in mind that the rules of evil swimming pool have been plenty fungible to this point, so it’s not like this was the only way the movie could end. It’s just how McGuire, in the sloppiness he shows throughout the whole endeavor, chose to conclude the movie. I don’t think McGuire believes that families with sick parents or sick children would be better off if that person just died. I do think his storytelling is so careless that Night Swim ends up delivering that message.

The film wants to say the completion of Ray’s arc is that he learns to sacrifice, but this is a sacrifice that still harms the whole family. Eve loses her husband, and Izzy and Elliot lose their father. Their lives aren’t made “easier,” and so any kind of heroism in Ray’s actions fall by the wayside as simply the mechanics of trying to appease the caprices of the evil swimming pool. It’s also a minor thing, but since there’s no body, the family has to either now lie about what happened to Ray, or say “he was eaten by our evil swimming pool.”

Dumb horror can be a lot of fun. Not everything needs to be the tight, existential dread you’d see in an A24 feature. But if you want to have fun with your audiences, that doesn’t mean simply throwing caution to the wind. You still have to craft your story in such a way that you don’t lose the thread of any emotional beats you’re trying to hit. I don’t mind that Night Swim tries to have a little emotional weight; I mind that it handles that weight so poorly that it sinks the picture.