Night Swim (2024)

This movie is dumb. But dumb with gusto. It doesn’t pretend not to be dumb. It’s about a haunted swimming pool. It revels in how dumb it is. This was based off a 3 minute youtube short, because, that’s the unfortunate trend with bankrupt creatives, to take something with a nugget of scary, and expand it out unto untold depths. And those depths should have remained untold because, where the three minute short had a visceral intensity and suspense, this lacks anything even remotely resembling it. It is certainly not the worst film ever made, there are a few decent jump scares, some very committed performances, and goes all-out gonzo on the commitment to legitimizing the concept of a haunted swimming pool, but can’t escape its inherent dumbness and the hilarity involved. Doubly hilarious is the creature reveal and the bad CG involved. This certainly qualifies for the camp of ‘its so dumb its fun’ mentality, despite some tedious family drama, but most will find the reality of algae and pool maintenance provide more legitimate terrors than this film offers.

D