Night Swim Ending Explained: What Is in the Haunted Pool?

Night Swim is the first horror movie release of 2024, bringing viewers a feature-length version of the 2014 horror short by filmmakers Rod Blackhurst and Bryce McGuire, with McGuire taking the reigns of this film alone, as both writer and director.  

The original Night Swim short had the blessing of never having to reveal any explanation for its haunted swimming pool. That mystery made viewers’ imaginations run wild with frightening possibilities and created very real dread that shattered the sense of safety about your home swimming pool. However, the feature-length version of Night Swim has to do the duty of creating actual horror lore around the premise of the short. 

In this article, We’ll break down what Night Swim’s haunted pool is all about – in FULL SPOILERS. 

What Is Night Swim About? 

The story of Night Swim follows the Waller family, whose patriarch Ray (Wyatt Russell) is an MLB player battling a Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis. The family moves into a house with a pool – the rare kind of pool that is connected to a freshwater source like a spring or lake. As the family’s dark experiences with the haunted pool begin to unfold, Ray finds himself particularly drawn to it, citing the water as a useful tool for helping him rehabilitate. Of course, the more Ray uses the pool the more he begins to go through a Shining-style descent, as the dark entity in the water begins to infect him. 

The rest of the Waller family also begin to experience supernatural phenomena with the pool; only for wife Eve (Kerry Condon), daughter Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle), and son Elliot (Gavin Warren) it’s a constant threat of danger or even death. Indeed, the malevolent force connected to the pool seems intently focused on the Wallers – and eventually, Eve uncovers the truth about why. 

Night Swim’s Haunted Pool Explained

It turns out that the freshwater spring feeding into the Waller Family’s pool isn’t just any body of water – it was an ancient source of mystically-powered water that inspired worldwide myths such as “wishing wells.” In this version of that myth, the entity inside the “well” (pool) grants the heartfelt wish of a desperate soul who swims in it – at the cost of claiming the life of someone close to them. As the time of the sacrifice arrives, the entity forcibly possesses the person making the wish, to ensure the sacrifice is completed. 

The lore gets a bit murkier regarding the “ghosts” of those claimed by the wishing well and their haunting presence. Some are nice, some are not, and it seems that multiple members of the Waller Family get targeted for possible sacrifice at one point or another during the film, not just one “chosen one” picked by the ghosts. Most odd is the “portal” in the pool – which transports victims to another realm (like in Stranger Things), one that looks and functions like the Sunken Place from Get Out – i.e., leaving victims drowning in a dark sea of inky blackness, with the pool water’s surface serving as the only ‘window’ to escape through, high up above. In the climactic act, we see the full mob of ghosts that are trapped there. 

How some characters survive moving in and out of this dark realm of the wishing well is never sufficiently explained.  

Night Swim Ending Explained

In the Third Act of Night Swim, Ray Waller is revealed to be the person desiring the wish – a wish that will return him to his physical prime and ensure his future as a baseball player. Ray’s descent into evil mirrors the story of the house’s previous owner Kay (Jodi Long), who sacrificed her daughter Rebecca (Ayazhan Dalabayeva) to cure her son Tommy (Joziah Lagonoy) of a fatal disease. Even though Tommy survived and thrived in life, Kay had to live out her days corrupted by the water’s evil. When Elliot Waller is chosen as the sacrifice and is taken to the dark realm by the pool, Eve must retrieve him, and Ray must prove his love for his family by gaining his senses long enough to take his son’s place as the sacrifice. 

Ray dies, but his new wish is seemingly fulfilled, as his family is spared from the wishing well’s hunger for a soul. Eve and the kids have the pool filled in and paved over, seemingly ending the threat for good. 

Night Swim is now in theaters.