[COLUMN] A Deep Dive on Night Swim | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Just to peer behind the curtain a little bit, earlier in the week my editor and colleague Marty Sliva noted “a distinct lack of Night Swim pitches” in my column proposals. So, this one is for you, Marty. For those who don’t want to take the dip, there’ll be another column to make up for this one. Beware of spoilers, as we’re jumping in at the deep end here.

Night Swim is a movie about a killer swimming pool. More than that, Night Swim is a bad movie about a killer swimming pool.

Night Swim is bad in boring ways. It is a high-concept short film stretched, through Herculean effort, to 100 minutes. At times, these efforts hit the “fun bad horror movie” sweet spot, as the film cycles through every pool-adjacent horror set piece it can imagine: demonic games of “Marco Polo”, mysterious figures looming on the other side of the water, and the vague sense that family patriarch Ray (Wyatt Russell) thinking about dipping more than his toe in the water, if you catch my drift.

However, a lot of Night Swim is more generic. There’s an extended sequence in the middle of the film where concerned wife and mother Eve (Kelly Condon) frantically researches the history of said killer swimming pool, eventually visiting former owner Lucy Summers (Jodi Long) for an exposition dump. Night Swim wears the influence of The Shining on its sleeve. This is obvious from early scenes, but builds to a climax where Ray is possessed by the property and compelled to murder his progeny.

The easiest way to write about Night Swim would be to construct a catalogue of the movie’s absurdities, as the wonderful Miles Surrey has done over at The Ringer. There is certainly a vicarious thrill to be had at rubbernecking at the film’s goofier moments, such as the sequence in which Eve tries to take the family away from the pool, only for Ray to protest. “There’s something wrong with that pool,” Eve protests. Ray replies, “Eve, there’s nothing wrong with the pool.”

However, that sort of analysis is well-trodden ground. While it might be fun to wade into that discussion of the movie’s shortcomings as well as its place in the January horror movie canon, R.E.M. had a point. Night Swim deserves more than just a quiet night. It’s worthy of a deep dive. After all, horror movies speak to something primal in the human psyche. They resonate on levels beyond the surface. So, what is Night Swim, the movie about a killer swimming pool, really about?

The film offers a half-hearted pseudo-intellectual explanation of its central horror early on, when Eve and Ray summon a technician (Ben Sinclair) to fix the pool on their new property. The big reveal in this scene is that the pool is “tapped into groundwater”, which is apparently “some sublevel aquifer shit.” Pressed on this point, the technician explains that this wellspring means that this innocuous backyard pool comes with “natural filtration,  geothermal heating, the whole shebang.”

However, this unnamed pool technician is not merely a man of science. He is a philosopher. He expounds on his own theory about what draws human beings to swimming pools, and the complicated dynamic at play. “It’s funny, isn’t it, though?” he ponders. “I mean, we evolved out of the water and some part of our reptilian brain knows we’re not supposed to be there anymore. But I guess that’s why we try to tame it so hard. It’s like trying to conquer death.”

We could wrap up here. After all, that guy is a pool technician and this is simply a column about movies. In an era of anti-intellectualism and false expertise, we should really trust this guy. After all, he knows the water. It’s his job. Who are we to suggest that this anonymous aquatic engineer doesn’t know what Night Swim is really about? What do we know about “sublevel aquifer shit?” He may well be right. However, to take this character at his word would feel like a shallow reading and would really let Marty down. Marty deserves more.

So, if we’re going to try to understand Night Swim, we should try to place it in its proper context. Now, admittedly, there is not a large canon of movies about killer swimming pools. However, we’ve already noted how heavily indebted Night Swim is to The Shining, another movie about a family that moves into a new property, in which the father develops an unhealthy (and not-too-subtly pseudo-sexual) relationship with that property before trying to murder his son.

However, The Shining is interesting in this case because it provides another framework through which we might understand Night Swim. The Shining released in 1980. Although the trend was overshadowed by the explosion of the slasher subgenre, the 1980s was a golden era for property horror. There were multiple franchises about haunted houses: Poltergeist, The Amityville Horror, and Jack would kill me if I didn’t also acknowledge House.

There have always been haunted house movies, but it’s interesting that the genre exploded in the aftermath of the 1970s. With inflation running amok, the Federal Reserve had dramatically jacked up interest rates during that decade. In October 1981, mortgage rates hit an all-time high of 18.5%, up from around 7% a decade earlier. For many Americans, the dream of owning a home quickly became a nightmare. For those who already owned homes, those properties became a curse.

In his wonderful book on writing, Danse Macabre, Stephen King wrote at length about this trend as an example of “the horror movie as economic nightmare.” This is barely subtext. Many sceptics believe that The Amityville Horror was fabricated by the real-life Lutz family as “the most profitable dog-ate-my-homework story ever told”, a way to get out of a “mortgage they evidently couldn’t afford” due to overpaying on the property.

These economic horrors undoubtedly resonate in the modern era. After all, the target audience for Night Swim is grappling with the reality that they are unlikely to ever own a house in the current economy. However, there is admittedly one snag in this reading of Night Swim. While the film is about a family moving house, Night Swim isn’t technically a haunted house movie. It is a movie about a killer swimming pool. That is a small – but crucial – distinction.

So, what do swimming pools represent in American life? Over the past thirty years or so, swimming pools have come to represent a certain kind of middle-class aspiration. The Simpsons dedicated an episode to the family getting a swimming pool. In Los Angeles, real estate agents treat pools like basic utilities, “almost like a kitchen.” During the pandemic, there was a boom in pool sales and construction, although inflation and the end of the pandemic have increased pool costs by 30%.

In Night Swim, Ray and Eve don’t appear to be struggling financially, but the pool is still an aspiration. “I always wanted a pool,” Ray admits. “When we were kids, we used to go down the street, break into the KOA, go swimming. We used to pretend that we were the rich kids from the suburbs.” Ray is a former professional athlete. He was a third baseman, the most “underappreciated position on the diamond.” However, his career has been derailed by an injury.

As a result, the family finds themselves adjusting to a new reality that their dreams are out of reach. “It’s going to take sacrifice from you both, but you can build a good life together,” their doctor (Rahnuma Panthaky) advises. “First, you have to let go of the old one.” However, Ray is unable to let go of the old life. He dreams of a return to the sport, powered by the pool. For Ray, this fixture is not just a swimming pool, it is a baptismal font from which he might be reborn, renewed, and refreshed.

In this sense, it’s possible to read Night Swim as a parable about opioid addiction, the tale of an injured man whose entire personality is transformed by a miraculous substance that alters his personality and causes his pain to go away. However, while never directly acknowledging the family’s finances, the film returns time and again to the idea of wealth and exchange. Most obviously, Ray has to use the pool for physical therapy because their insurance won’t cover professional assistance.

Throughout the movie, the family plays a game in which they throw quarters into the water and dive to retrieve them – a handy literalization of the costs involved in maintaining a pool. At one point, Ray and Eve’s son Elliot (Gavin Warren) glues a quarter to his action figure. It gets lost in the pool. When the pool returns the figure, the coin is gone. Lucy Summers compares the pool to a wishing well. “Throw a coin in the water and pray with all your heart,” she recalls. It’s transactional.

Night Swim reveals the pool water springs from some primal source deep within the American continent, like the burial grounds in The Shining or Poltergeist. Ray is immersing himself in the pure filtered essence of the American Dream. Ray believes he can have anything he wants, if he tries hard enough and pays a steep enough cost. Teaching Elliot to close the pool cover, he urges, “Keep going. You strike out, you keep going. Don’t give up. That’s the key. That’s the only thing that matters.”

Summers tries to tie the pool to a primitive force, describing it as a mechanism of “sacrifice”, but Eve understands the logic of the market. “It’s not a sacrifice if you get something back,” she protests. There is a rugged individualism at play here, a selfishness. The pool is willing to grant Ray his desires, for a price. Ray can have everything he wants again, if he’s willing to give Elliot to the pool in return. It’s a story about parents sacrificing their young to chase nostalgic fantasies.

This perhaps gets at another aspect of the pool in contemporary American life. Historically, pools have been communal spaces. Ray talks about sneaking into a campsite to go swimming. Eve recalls her father teaching her to swim at Fort Benning. Something is lost when the pool goes from being a shared space to a piece of personal property. The social fabric is eroded by the loss of a communal activity. In Night Swim, a private pool party becomes a source of tension between Ray and Eve and their new friends like Coach E (Eddie Martinez) and his wife Kay (Nancy Lenehan).

In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam argued that one could correlate the decline of the sense of community with the way that Americans bowled. Putnam argued that, although more Americans were bowling than ever before, fewer were partaking in communal activities like leagues, and this reflected broader trends in how people were interacting. In Night Swim, one of Eve’s first indications that something is wrong is that Ray has taken to swimming alone.

The private pool occupies a unique and interesting place in the American popular psyche. It is at once an aspiration, materialism, and a reflection of an increasingly individualist society. Whether intentionally or not, these ideas all bubble through Night Swim, lurking beneath the surface of a bad movie about a killer swimming pool.