Night Swim - Bland Netflix Horror That Comes So Close To Saying Something Real

I’ve heard from a lot of people who really liked the last post here on the Chogg Blog, and I’m really excited to reveal some of the new stuff I’ve been working on in the next few months! In the meantime, we are going to keep making cOnTeNt in the best possible way - by doing a Flick Through Review on some below-average horror trash that you can watch right now on Netflix.

Today’s target - Night Swim.

What’s A Night Swim

Marketing is really weird for movies now. There are movies with real budgets that just fly right under the radar and never appear in trailers or algorithms or on the front page of whatever streaming thing you use. At some point last year, I caught a trailer for Night Swim. It didn’t reveal much. There’s a spooky pool that eats people who swim in it when it’s dark. To anybody else, that would either immediately leave their memory or instantly become a movie to avoid. I, however, am not anybody else. As a purveyor of the awful, I added the film to my infinitely long IMDb watchlist and waited. 

Then, scrolling through horror on Netflix and looking for stuff to rot my brain with, I come across something that has a real actor in it. Wyatt Russell is Kurt Russell’s son, and I quite like Kurt Russell! This film is even on my watchlist! This is how I was captured by Night Swim. Despite my recognising it for the trash it was at first glance, I left it long enough that I got tricked by the star power exactly as they intended.

Baseball Family

We get propelled through character introductions - Russell is a baseball dad who had to retire from being a star athlete because of a quickly progressing disease. His wife is glad that he gets to be at home more, but worries about him. His daughter is a sporty girl who is very interested in the Christian Swim Club. The younger brother is weird and every character takes a second in the first thirty minutes to mention how he talks to himself or struggles to make friends; he is just generally a bit disappointing. 

Baseball dad is with his family, looking for houses and doesn’t want his whole life to revolve around him being sick. They look at a different house, one with a pool, and Wyatt Russell decides this is where he wants to live. There is some light here - we see baseball dad watching footage of him and his children when they were younger and mourning the loss of so much time that he missed. He wants to give his family the time they deserve, and for a while, they all seem genuinely happy.

But spooky things are happening in the pool. The weird son speaks to a little girl on the other side of a vent. The daughter plays Marco Polo with a ghost - sidenote, Marco Polo is such an American thing that I can not take it seriously, and this film revealed that there are layers of rules to this game I have not even begun to comprehend. And then the big reveal: the pool used to be a wishing well and is fed from the same water, and the pennies they have been throwing in the bottom to dive for have been activating the wish powers or something. It’s a little mystical and a little silly, and I think that I really like it.

I’m finding more and more value in trying to pick at what a movie is trying to say. Night Swim doesn’t really ‘try’ to say anything. But there are things hidden in its depths (get it?) - little hints at thoughts going on in the society that made it. The pool is obviously a symbol of performative wealth, whether it was supposed to be or not. But baseball dad is struggling. Not really struggling for money, but struggling against the expectation that he will provide for his family by going out and doing his baseball. That’s why we see him pushing to buy an extravagant house that doesn’t have all the bells and whistles to support his illness. He moves into the position of a real and present father to perform the image of the man he thinks he should be. The worst line in the film kind of feeds into this, when baseball dad suggests a pool party to show off to the neighbourhood: “we can be the pool family”. The house tells him what kind of man to be.

The wishing well needs something in return, though. A life has to be sacrificed, and in return, Wyatt Russell will be fully healed and will be able to get back to his baseball life. In one of the actually good moments, we see that as he has started to recover, whatever change had happened in his attitude to his family has shifted back - he has recorded a baseball audition tape over the footage of his young children. But, just like wealth and the performance of extravagance, something has to be sacrificed to move forward. The youngest child is the price that the family will pay. If I were going to run with the metaphor a little, I would say that the youngest child is the same character who was let down the most by his father’s absence - baseball dad sacrifices part of his family to sustain the chase for wealth.

In Reality

Really, Night Swim finishes with baseball dad getting possessed by the spirit of the well. The mother learns all of the information quickly enough to make sure the film is paced nicely. Wyatt Russell is really quite bad as a water-addicted, disabled man. But he sacrifices himself in the end, learning that the cost of remaining a pool family is not worth paying and making his amends for putting his family last by giving his life for them to carry on. The mother and two children fill the pool with concrete, and that’s that. A trash film that felt like it had a lot of ideas but was never brave enough to go below the surface. I wouldn’t recommend it, but I can’t lie. This is my kind of trash.

Thanks for keeping up with the blog guys! I’m trying to turn this into something really cool, so if you want to keep getting notifications when a new blog goes live then drop your email at the bottom of the page and maybe share this or my last post with someone you think might like it. The Flick Through Review format is really nice for getting quick thoughts onto the blog and give me time to work on big pieces like the next post for the website so stay tuned. For more me in the meantime, click the podcast tab at the top of the page to hear me lose my mind about Sonic the Hedgehog. It’s a whole thing.