Review: Night Swim

Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.

There have been movies about haunted paintings ("Velvet Buzzsaw"), haunted dresses ("In Fabric") and even one about a possessed clothing press ("The Mangler"), so a haunted swimming pool? Why not?

Bryce McGuire's feature film - based upon a 2014 short film of the same name - opens in 1992 when a curious young girl with an ailing brother is lured out to the pool and attempts to retrieve her brother's toy boat from the pool before being pulled in and drowned by some mysterious force.

Many years later, a baseball player named Ray Waller (Wyatt Russell) who has been diagnosed with multiple-sclerosis moves his family to the home in Minnesota where the pool has been all but abandoned under a tarp for many years. Ray and wife Eve (Kerry Condon) are attracted to the pool because Ray has been advised by a doctor that swimming is an exercise that can act as a form of therapy for his condition.

Shortly after moving into the place and taking a few dips in the pool, family members begin having strange experiences. Sensitive son Elliot (Gavin Warren) is semi-attacked in the pool and the girl drowned in the opening scene communicates with him. His teenage sister, Izzy (Amelie Hoeferle), is similarly provoked by an entity of some sort while playing Marco Polo with her new boyfriend.

Eve has her own experience and begins to suggest to her husband that they, perhaps, should flee the house to safer environs. But Ray has been entranced by the pool - and the demon that lies within it - and things come to a head during a pool party in which the Wallers invite their new friends and neighbors over for a dip. While Ray's condition begins to improve, quite possibly due to the healing powers that the pool offers, his family continues to be terrorized.

The explanation we finally get for the pool's magical powers and possible possession is a little bit of a letdown, and the film has a finale that feels phoned in for this type of picture. In other words, whatever you guess is likely to happen probably does.

There are some genuinely creepy moments in the film, most notably the opening sequence and some well-shot underwater sequences in which the house's inhabitants float above while something clearly lurks below. That being said, "Night Swim" is a fairly forgettable horror movie that is never quite as campy as its premise promises nor scary enough for viewers to take its somewhat ludicrous plot seriously. As such, it's an occasionally passable horror movie that is never really comes together in a memorable way, spending way too much time in the - ahem! - shallow end.