Metacritic reviews

Last-act let-down aside, this is a confident and creepy ghoul-in-the-pool horror that makes Bryce McGuire a filmmaker to watch. Wusses, bring armbands.

Despite some choppy waters in the back half, this is a fun, funny, often genuinely unnerving horror movie experience, one that might make you think twice about that first swim of the year when summer rolls around.

Ultimately, Night Swim is a bit of a contradiction in terms, a mostly generic horror film that impressively adds a few unique elements to the proceedings. It's a shame that McGuire doesn't follow Russell's lead and allow the movie to really go bonkers; perhaps they were intimidated by 2002's "Dark Water" or the "Jack Frost" films, which do more with the idea of "evil water" than is seen here. Still, "Night Swim" delivers the goods enough to be a fun time, and like a day in a backyard pool, it may not be super memorable but that doesn't mean it's not enjoyable.

There is absolutely an audience for this: one that will delight in watching Condon full-on battle a pool cover and cackle hearing Russell say, with his whole chest, “That pool is the best thing…THAT EVER HAPPENED TO ME.”

Kerry Condon follows up her Oscar nomination with a thankless piece of Blumhouse schlock that tries, and fails, to make swimming pools scary.

Despite the filmmaker’s best efforts to drum up suspense via the usual jump scares, Night Swim turns out to be just as silly as it sounds.

Night Swim is a missed opportunity of epic proportions, and it’s yet another in a streak of Blumhouse projects failing to bring anything new to the horror genre.

There’s an elegiac beauty to many of Night Swim’s pool scenes, but everything that surrounds them is leaden, from Wyatt Russell’s comatose performance to the baseball metaphors that have been unsubtly shoehorned into the impossibly routine narrative.

A damp-squib horror with zero thrills. Russell and Condon deserve much better.

Night Swim has its characters make infuriatingly asinine decisions to serve its plot.