Quartile rating: 5/10 · 1 rating
Forced into early retirement by a degenerative illness, former baseball player Ray Waller moves into a new house with his wife and two children. He hopes that the backyard swimming pool will be fun for the kids and provide physical therapy for himself. However, a dark secret from the home's past soon unleashes a malevolent force that drags the family into the depths of inescapable terror.
Night Swim is a competent but largely forgettable supernatural horror expanded from a short film to feature length, and it shows. The premise of a malevolent pool is mildly interesting on paper but the execution is formulaic — a family moves into a new house with a dark secret, a fairly standard haunted-object setup. The acting is serviceable but unremarkable, with characters who feel thinly written and whose motivations are often implausible. Cinematography leans on standard horror conventions — dark water, murky depths, jump scares — without offering any particularly memorable imagery or distinctive visual language. The film's novelty is limited; while a swimming pool as the haunted object is slightly less common than a house or mirror, the mechanics of the horror are recycled genre beats. The ending is particularly weak, failing to deliver a satisfying resolution or meaningful payoff to the family drama thread, leaving the film feeling like a padded short rather than a fully realized feature.