Night Swim 2024 Movie Review
Based on the acclaimed 2014 short film by Rod Blackhurst and Bryce McGuire, the film stars Wyatt Russell (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier) as Ray Waller, a former major league baseball player forced into early retirement by a degenerative illness, who moves into a new home with his concerned wife Eve (Oscar® nominee Kerry Condon, The Banshees of Inisherin), teenage daughter Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle, this fall’s The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes) and young son Elliot (Gavin Warren, Fear the Walking Dead).
Secretly hoping, against the odds, to return to pro ball, Ray persuades Eve that the new home’s shimmering backyard swimming pool will be fun for the kids and provide physical therapy for him. But a dark secret in the home’s past will unleash a malevolent force that will drag the family under, into the depths of inescapable terror.
Every kid at one point in time has had an irrational fear of sharks or some other devious creatures lurking in the deep end of the pool after dark. Humans are most vulnerable in water, as they generally don’t have much clothing on to protect them while swimming, not to mention a wide range of variables in how fast they can swim or how long they can hold their breath underwater. The fastest recorded human swimming speed was held by Tom Jager in 1990 during a 50-meter freestyle at a rate of 2.29 meters per second. This was recently blasted out of the water by Olympic medalist Michael Phelps, with a clocked speed of 6 miles per hour, or 2.68 meters per second, with an average racing speed of around 4.5 miles per hour. Keep in mind that the average swimmer can usually only swim at a rate of maybe 2 miles per hour.
To put this into perspective, Phelps only reached those speeds at certain times during the peak of his career, whereas the average swimming speed of a predatory land-based animal like a bear, comes out to be around 6 miles per hour. Considering the fact that great white sharks have an average speed of around 25 miles per hour, even an Olympic swimmer is at a considerable disadvantage if they find themselves in the water with a predatory creature. But what if the creature isn’t a bear or a shark? How does one measure the swimming speed of supernatural entities?
Based on a 2014 short film by the same name, Night Swim encapsulates all these thoughts (and horrifying “fun facts”) about how vulnerable humans can be when they’re in bodies of water… even a chlorinated swimming pool. Horror icons James Wan and Jason Blum have teamed up as producers for the feature-length adaptation under their respective Atomic Monster and Blumhouse Productions banners. Universal Pictures acquired the distribution rights shortly after.
Originally slated to be released on January 19, 2024, the timeline has moved up slightly with a new release date of January 5, 2024. The film will enjoy an exclusive theatrical release and will enjoy the distinction of being the first theatrical release of the year.
Once the film’s theatrical window ends it will become available to stream on Peacock which is where other recent horror titles from Universal were able to stream after their theatrical release, such as M3GAN and Renfield.
Yes! Universal Pictures released the first official trailer for Night Swim on October 5. In the trailer, you can see Kerry Condon and Wyatt Russell as a married couple who just recently bought and moved into a house. After they restore the pool, their daughter goes for a Night Swim with a friend of hers to play Marco Polo.
It’s unclear how closely Night Swim will follow the original short film’s premise, but considering Bryce McGuire is at the helm of this adaptation, it will likely take the same elements of the short and explore them in more detail. The short film, Night Swim, follows a young woman (played by Megalyn Echikunwoke in the short) who decides to take a dip in her backyard inground swimming pool as she waits for her partner to return from work. She puts relaxing music on and goes about doing her laps, decompressing from her day. While underwater, she notices a tall, shadowy figure standing by the side of the pool. Assuming it’s her boyfriend, she surfaces to greet him, but there’s nobody there. Perplexed, she goes back under the water to verify if she actually saw someone or if it was just a trick that the water displacement played on her eyes.
Then she sees that same shadowy figure moving to dive into the pool. She quickly resurfaces again and swims to the side of the pool to catch her breath, where she sees the figure slowly walking toward her. As she swims backward, away from the silhouette, she is dragged under the water by an unseen entity and the pool lights go out. When the lights finally come back on, the pool is crystal clear, pristine… and empty. You can watch the original 3-minute short film, uploaded by creator Rod Blackhurst, to get more of an idea of what’s to come with the full-length film adaptation!
