I cannot tell the difference between enjoying a gimmicky horror movie and enjoying getting tipsy to a gimmicky horror movie with my friends.  Is the January schlock horror flick about the killer swimming pool genuinely enjoyable, or did I just enjoy hanging out in an empty multiplex on its opening night, opening a couple smuggled cans of sparkling wine to share with pals?  Unclear.  What I do know is that every calendar year deserves at least one wide-release horror about a killer object, and this year we’re being spoiled with at least two: the one about the killer pool (Night Swim) and an upcoming one about a killer teddy bear (Imaginary).  Last year, we were even more spoiled with an especially fun one about a killer doll powered by A.I. (M3GAN).  Other recent triumphs include one about a killer dress (In Fabric), a killer jacket (Deerskin), a killer weave (Bad Hair), and the killer pool’s distant cousin the killer water slide (Aquaslash).  I’m already looking forward to next year’s Panerasploitation pic about killer lemonade, which could learn a thing or two about how Night Swim stretches a simple premise about killer liquid to fill up a feature runtime. If nothing else, it would make for a fun time-killer on the first Friday of 2025.

If there’s any clear argument against Night Swim’s value as a novelty horror about a haunted object, it’s that it gets distracted from its killer [INSERT NOUN HERE] premise with a second, unrelated noun: baseball.  Wyatt Russell continues his campaign to replace Kevin Costner as the go-to Baseball Movie guy by starring as a Major League player whose career is derailed by a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis.  Conveniently enough, his doctors prescribe that he starts water therapy to help lessen the severity of his MS symptoms, an easy win for a man who just bought a house with a haunted swimming pool.  In the ideal version of this movie, the pool would be a deadly threat simply because it is a pool, and all action & dialogue would take place either poolside or underwater.  In the version we got, the pool is deadly because Wyatt Russell wants to play baseball again, making a bargain with the evil pool to regain the lost functions of his body so he can return to the majors.  The pool grants his wish but requires a sacrifice, so Russell has to choose which of his two children he loves less (much like Fritz Von Erich in The Iron Claw).  The choice is hilariously easy for Baseball Dad, who has one athletic child and one indoor kid. Still, at some point in the bargaining process he becomes a zombielike soldier who carries out the pool’s evil will even when he’s not swimming – possibly because roughly 60% of his body is made of water, an additional vulnerability on top of his all-consuming obsession with professional baseball.

Distractions on the baseball diamond aside, Night Swim provides plenty of evil swimming pool content for anyone tickled by its premise.  It touches on as many pool-related activities as it can in 100 minutes, ranging from the genuinely spooky (reaching into a filter or drain without being able to see what you’re touching, sometimes being greeted with sharp objects or mysterious wet hair) to the deeply silly (horrifying games of Marco Polo, chicken fight, and diving for coins).  It cheats on its killer-object premise as often as it can, not only by making Baseball Dad a walking pool zombie but also by filling the pool with the CGI ghosts of past sacrifices.  It also shamelessly borrows iconic scares from much better films, referencing both the toy-in-the-drain sequence from IT and the Sunken Place reality break from Get Out.  That latter allusion at least feels true to the liminal realms of underwater swimming, though, and Night Swim is at its most convincingly cinematic when the evil pool becomes a boundaryless void disconnected from the baseball-obsessed suburbia above the water’s surface.  In one of its most inspired scenes, Kerry Condon (following up her Oscar nominated performance in Banshees of Inisherin with the formidable role of Baseball Dad’s browbeating wife) goes for an ill-advised nigh swim and the camera assumes her POV, revealing demonic jump scares as her head rotates from underwater to sideways surface breaths.  It’s a clever gag that can only work in a movie about a killer pool, which is all we’re really looking for in this kind of novelty.

The most potentially divisive aspect of Night Swim is its decision to mostly play its swimming-pool premise with deadpan seriousness.  There are a couple moments when it winks at the audience (most notably in a scene where Wyatt Russell explains his miraculous recovery from MS with the inane line “We have a pool”, delivered directly to camera), but for the most part its goofy tone is underplayed.  There’s plenty of humor to be found in the fact that every single thought in these non-characters’ heads could be neatly categorized as either “BASEBALL” or “POOL”, but the film thankfully never dives into the self-mocking parody of a Cocaine Bear.  The pool is deadly serious business to them, and the inherent silliness of the premise is allowed to speak for itself in contrast to their poolside misery.  A lot of audiences will be frustrated by that refusal to indulge in full-tilt horror comedy, but not every first-weekend January schlock release can be a clever crowd-pleaser like M3GAN.  It wasn’t Night Swim‘s job to constantly jab the audience in the ribs and ask, “Isn’t this killer pool movie hilarious???”  That task is best left to a small group of tipsy friends with a couple hours to kill on a Friday night.

-Brandon Ledet