Fair use from Universal Pictures

“Night Swim” came out to theaters Jan. 5. This horror movie was a very anticipated new watch for the start of this year. “Night Swim” tells us the story of a family who moves into a new house that has a haunted swimming pool, giving us insight that countless previous owners of the house have died or have been possessed by this pool. We see how each member of this family deals with the pool and faces their own horrific moments while being in the pool. Slowly, members of the family become possessed by a haunted spirit in the pool, leading to distress and inner conflict between the family and causing scarier scenes than the pool itself. Despite the unique plotline, I thought this was a very dull and not scary movie.

The whole plot of this movie was incredibly basic and boring. The whole premise of this movie is a family moving into a house with a haunted pool, differing from most horror movies in which the entire house is haunted. With the family having a fresh start with a new life, all they can think about is how they love the new pool. However, there’s not much backstory to why or how it became a possessed pool — it’s a very vague and basic idea that the pool is possessed. I also think it’s very hard to create a horror movie with such a basic object like a pool and make the whole movie surround that idea, which ultimately was shown throughout the movie. There was hardly any focus on the plot between the characters in the movie, which created stale and boring acting from the cast. It was very hard to create a plot line based on the idea that the pool is possessed.  

I felt that this movie wasn’t that scary and failed to reach expectations of being a proper horror movie. There were definitely times where I felt anticipation and felt like a jumpscare coming, but it rarely actually happened. There were very few moments until the very end of the movie, which even then didn’t feel that scary or anticlimactic. It showed that, at least from my perspective, this wasn’t a really scary movie. There are definitely moments where weird spirit beings jumped from the water and tried to drag down the characters or scenes of members of the family being pushed under by the water and drowning, but I don’t think it gives us that much horror to work with as a horror movie. I think that loses a lot of credibility for a movie like this. I had very high expectations that this would be a really scary movie, but instead I just barely felt the rush of watching a horror movie and feeling that anticipation. There were also moments where there were jumpscares or scenes that would go from one to 100, but there was no set up to these scenes that were supposed to build up suspense. The movie rushed these scenes which I think also ruined it. I felt like I was lied to from what I thought this movie would be. 

The production of this movie seemed very basic and felt like no work was put in to make the setting of this movie look appealing. There were definitely some cool moments of portraying the pool to show off the eeriness of it, but other than that the whole movie felt portrayed very boring. It felt like no work was put into making the house that they lived in look appealing or other settings that were shot during this film. From a camera aspect, it felt like a poorly made movie production-wise. Nothing wowed me and it just didn’t feel like a high-end production type of movie, when I thought from trailers that it would be that type of movie. It was most likely a different approach at trying to make everything seem dimmer and darker to show that it is a horror movie, but I just didn’t like that. If it was actually scary then I would understand the approach, but it just wasn’t. Even from seeing the actual possessed spirits seemed very random, in that we don’t get a backstory on why they possessed the pool. The CGI(Computer-Generated Images), in the portrayal of the spirit also seemed really wonky and kind of funny looking, it wasn’t really scary at all.

The acting in this movie was not that good. We barely know that much about the main characters of this movie, which is a family of four. We get little insight into their life, and we only really get the premise that they’re moving due to work. There’s little to no depth of storyline for these characters. It felt like the characters were talking in very basic and vague words, which just made the movie seem very stale. Not knowing much about them made the movie feel rushed to focus solely on the issue of the haunted pool. 

I would not recommend watching this movie. If you are someone who does enjoy watching horror movies and wants to be scared easily, this movie is not for you. Even if you are someone who enjoys a movie with a somewhat interesting plot, then again I would highly doubt that you would enjoy this movie. There is basically little to this movie that I really enjoyed, other than the fact that I thought it was a somewhat interesting approach to making a horror movie about a possessed pool.

“Night Swim”: ★☆☆☆☆