Night Swim’s Haunted Pool Ending Reveal Still Doesn’t Explain The Waller Family’s Most Shocking Death

Night Swim features a shocking death scene that is never explained by the movie, even in the ending. Night Swim follows the Waller story of the family, a set of unfortunate suburbanites who purchase a new home only to discover their pool is haunted. This might sound like the setup for a silly supernatural spoof, but no one is left laughing by Night Swim’s grim ending. The Blumhouse horror movie takes its zany premise surprisingly seriously, which didn’t help the mixed reviews received by the PG-13 effort upon its January release.

While Night Swim 2 might happen thanks to the original movie turning a tidy profit on its small budget, the underwhelming critical reception of Night Swim won’t help its prospects. Among the biggest issues with the movie was Night Swim’s unnecessarily complex lore. As Wyatt Russell’s former athlete develops a strange connection to the pool, his wife begins to realize that the victims claimed by the pool follow a pattern. This is central to the ending of Night Swim, but it doesn’t track throughout the whole movie. This revelation makes one Night Swim scene particularly jarring.

The Cat’s Death Doesn’t Make Sense: Whose Life Was It Saving In Exchange?

Night Swim’s villain typically trades one death for another life

Night Swim’s pool takes a life so that someone else can live, a ruthless bargain that forces the horror movie’s heroes to contend with their ethics. Although the rules of the pool indicate that one life is sacrificed for the pool to help save another, this doesn’t explain one major death. If the pool takes lives to save them, then why did it kill the family’s cat? The sacrifice of the Waller family’s cat broke their hearts, but it didn’t have any tangible effect on the pool’s intake/output system.

No one had their life spared or saved in exchange for the cat, or at least this was never explained on-screen. Since the cat’s death seems needlessly bleak in light of the circumstances, this plot hole feels particularly egregious. The death of the family cat is one scene that proves Night Swim is not a horror comedy despite its wild premise, so it is a bit odd that the movie’s saddest moment doesn’t even fit within its established reality. The rules of the pool are pretty clear throughout the rest of the movie, but in this instance, the numbers are messed with for no obvious reason.

Night Swim Unnecessarily Committed A Horror Movie Cardinal Sin

Night Swim killed off an innocent pet unlike many darker gorier horror movies

Throughout the history of the horror genre, killing off cute pets has always been seen as a particularly dark gag. Some movies can get away with this, but even R-rated horror movies as grim as Evil Dead Rise and Alien had cats or dogs that survived the story because audiences often get more upset about that than human deaths. Night Swim killing off a cat and failing to even justify this within the movie’s plot felt like a betrayal, both because the rest of the movie wasn’t this dark and because even much darker horror movies typically allow pets to survive, no matter how unlikely.