After moving into a new house, a family begins to suspect the pool in their backyard is haunted. Based on writer and director Bryce McGuire’s short film, Night Swim serves up a few creepy moments but ultimately drowns as it doesn’t build a cohesive or intriguing story that culminates into something memorable.
Struggling with a recent diagnosis, former baseball star Ray Waller (Russell) moves his family into a new home. It’s the first time his wife and two kids will have solid roots, but he is finding it difficult to come to terms with the end of his career. Lucky for them, their new digs come with a pool, which will be great physical therapy for Ray.
One night, his wife Eve (Kerry Condon) goes for a swim and is startled by a vision of her husband, who’s fast asleep inside. As the family continues to get settled in, the kids begin to have similarly strange occurrences happen to them as they use the pool.
As Eve grows increasingly concerned about their safety, she delves into the history of their new home, revealing its dark past in her quest to protect her family.
The latest supernatural flick from Blumhouse, Night Swim is a fairly run-of-the-mill haunt that winds up being rather forgetful. The initial setup is promising but is inevitably a puddle of disjointed ideas and rushed execution.
After a spooky opening, we meet the Waller family, and the film does a decent job setting them up. Aside from Dad being an all-star athlete, they’re a pretty average family with a sweet dynamic, and you empathize with their situation as Ray deals with a debilitating disease. From there, we get some mild teases of a supernatural presence. I enjoyed how the film toys with subtle visuals of whatever haunts the pool rather than relying solely on jump scares.
It shows McGuire has a pulse on what can frighten audiences. But the film never fully delivers on the frights you expect. We see a few ghostly apparitions and some gnarly-looking entities that, in the end, serve no real purpose or hold a deeper connection to what haunts the pool.
Looking at his 2014 short film with Rod Blackhurst, there’s wonderful suspense in just three minutes, and the simplicity of it makes for an effective story. But unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like much thought was put into expanding the story for this feature-length version.
In the third act, without going into spoilers, we’re fed an incomplete truth about the pool and the origins of whatever curse may be plaguing the family. It never really gets into aquatic horror territory or even the eco-horror connection it implies. It’s not grounded in anything and felt very slapped on — and again, fails to connect with the ghosts and entities it gives us glimpses of.
Sadly with Night Swim, you’re not treated to anything that scary to make it memorable. And for a completed story, it really needed to dive more intensely into the subgenres it teeters on and offer audiences something holistic.
Jordy Reviews It 
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