‘Night Swim’ Review: Wyatt Russell and Kerry Condon Struggle to Keep Low-Rent Horror Flick Afloat

Unless you don’t know how to swim, swimming pools simply aren’t scary. Sure, some of them can be pretty gross, depending on how well their owners maintain them. And if bugs or other creatures die in them, that can be disgusting. But mostly they seem like a nice place to relax on a warm summer day. That’s the main problem with Bryce McGuire’s feature about a haunted swimming pool, adapted from a 2014 short film he made in collaboration with Rod Blackhurst. 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.  

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The short that provided this film’s inspiration had a running time of under four minutes, which sounds exactly right. Unfortunately, the feature version runs 98 minutes, its simple premise gussied up with a backstory mythology that isn’t likely to make Stephen King green with envy. And when the most chilling line in a movie is “There’s something wrong with that pool!” it’s all too easy to imagine the barbs on a future episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

The story begins with a prologue set in 1992 when a little girl attempts to retrieve a mysterious toy boat from her backyard swimming pool and meets an unfortunate end. Cut to the present day, when we’re introduced to the Waller family: Ray (Wyatt Russell), a former baseball player whose career was cut short by multiple sclerosis; his supportive wife, Eve (Oscar nominee Kerry Condon, The Banshees of Inisherin); teenage daughter Izzy (Amelie Hoeferle, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes); and 12-year old son Elliot (Gavin Warren, Fear the Walking Dead), who hasn’t inherited his father’s athletic ability.

The family, unaware of the house’s fateful history, makes the mistake of buying the home with the pool, with Ray believing that daily water therapy will help him counteract the effects of his pernicious disease. (This, despite the fact that the first time he sees it he falls in and nearly drowns.) It also turns out the pool has water provided by a natural spring thought to have healing properties, which indeed seems to be the case as Ray’s condition miraculously improves.  

Cue the inevitable disturbing incidents, as the family members prove weirdly determined to stick their hands in every available opening in the pool with predictably unhappy results. Only their pet cat seems to know something is wrong with the pool — the animals in horror films are always smarter than the humans — but not surprisingly it soon turns up missing, its leash floating in the water.

The film attempts to do for swimming pools what Jaws did for the ocean, with Marco Polo and other pool party games suddenly turning sinister and potentially deadly. Except Jaws had a genuinely terrifying monster in the form of a great white shark, while Night Swim has fleetingly glimpsed supernatural creatures of the kind you might see when you get too much chlorine in your eyes. And when they do become more visible as the story goes on, they look like waterlogged Halloween masks.

Swimming pools don’t get haunted without a reason, of course. The one eventually revealed here turns out to be a doozy, dating back generations, having something to do with a demonic wishing well. By the time one of the main characters becomes possessed by whatever is haunting the pool, the film has thoroughly devolved into campiness.

To their credit, the actors elevate the material. Russell, son of Kurt, has clearly inherited his father’s innate relaxed appeal; Condon, in a film that’s frankly beneath her, invests her portrayal with surprising depth; and Hoeferle and Warren are thoroughly natural as the beleaguered kids. And director McGuire, whose previous feature credit is 2018’s Unfollowed, proves more than adept at adhering to the Blumhouse low-budget horror film playbook. But for all their efforts, Night Swim won’t make you think twice about jumping into a pool on a hot summer night.