If I moved into a house with a swimming pool full of ghosts that kill people, I would simply not swim in the pool. But this family is different. This is a mostly spoiler-free review, but honestly, if you have seen any horror movie in your life you know exactly what happens.
“Night Swim” follows a family in the Twin Cities moving into a new house. They become obsessed with the idea of having a pool, and there is only one house in Minneapolis that has one. The two kids and mom (played by Kerry Condon – get your check, girl) become increasingly disturbed by suspicious things happening in said pool. But the dad, typical man in a horror movie he is, doesn’t care because his illness is getting better and his logical explanation is that it’s all because the “Indian burial ground” the pool was built on has magic healing powers. You can imagine the rest.
Now, I know next to nothing about sports of any kind, but considering how much of this movie is dedicated to the game of baseball, my hand is being forced here to talk about it. For a movie about a haunted swimming pool, there is so much baseball in this movie. It’s a major plot point that the dad used to be a professional player for the Brewers but had to retire due to illness. He is now trying to get his son interested in baseball by getting involved in the school little league team. This causes a lot of strife in the family because the son gets jealous that his professional athlete father that pushed him into playing a sport he’s not really interested in hits the ball better than him. Seriously, more screen time is given to this storyline than the pool. Towards the middle there I forgot this was supposed to be a horror movie and not a poorly constructed drama about the weight of familial expectations. The movie didn’t even do baseball well, apparently. My friend who I saw this with admitted afterwards that he suggested this specific movie to see because of this Reddit post about how it violates the CBA. Also according to my friend, in the scenes where they play baseball, the guy has really bad form and would never make it to the major leagues.
Normally in supernatural horror movies, the horror is a representation of something happening in the main characters’ “real life.” The Babadook represents grief, trauma, and depression. The Overlook hotel is addiction, corruption, and isolation. The swimming pool is… parental favoritism I guess? That’s the best I could come up with, but the metaphor comes apart the more I think about it. There are also themes about the dark side of ambition, but the pool barely has anything to do with that. There’s a bit of “be careful what you wish for” there, too, I guess. It kind of feels like they threw a bunch of themes at the wall to see what sticks.
Ok, spoilers in this paragraph because I walked away with one specific gripe I can’t contain, skip to the next paragraph if you want to stay spoiler free. Right, so the rules of the pool were that it will make a sick person healthy but requires one death in exchange. But the rules for who is a valid sacrifice to get the pool’s gifts were definitely suspect. We are led to believe that historically a person who lives in the house will be healed if another person in the house is sacrificed, thus the parental favoritism metaphor. But why did the pool try to influence the dad to kill one of the son’s friends who didn’t live there? Would that have satisfied the pool’s sacrifice requirement since that kid wasn’t a family member? That kid was supposed to be the “ideal son” to foil the actual son not meeting the dad’s expectations, so the dad trying to kill him is what makes the parental favoritism metaphor fall apart. Also, at the beginning of the movie, the pool eats the family cat. Why would it do that? Just for funsies? They didn’t get anything for the death of the cat. And we are given no reason to believe the pool just kills for no reason. It makes no sense.
Anyway, “Night Swim” definitely feels like something studio execs ordered after coming up with the trailer idea. I’m not saying that’s what actually happened, just that the scene that made up the trailer was the most exciting part and the rest felt half assed. The pool didn’t even really matter to the plot until the last third. Overall, though, I had a blast watching it. This is definitely a fun movie to watch with friends, just as long as you don’t think too hard about it. I was entertained for two hours.
Fun rating: 3/5
Quality rating: 1.5/5
