The Wallers are excited to move into their new home, especially because it has a pool that will allow Ray (Wyatt Russell), a former major league baseball player who had to end his career early due to injuries, plenty of time for water therapy to restore his muscles.  His wife, Eve (Kerry Condon), and their two children, Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle) and Elliot (Gavin Warren), also spend numerous hours splashing and swimming.  The allure wears off when strange things begin to happen when the Wallers are alone in the water, and after a near-tragic accident at a neighborhood pool party, Eve begins to research the history of the house and finds that there has been a long list of mysterious disappearances and deaths associated with their new home. 

Bryce McGuire writes and directs Night Swim, a feature-length extension of his 2014 short film of the same name.  The 98-minute film is the first collaborative effort between modern horror houses Blumhouse and Atomic Monster, and the film secured a theatrical release from Universal Pictures.  Its teaser trailer presented itself as a poolside slasher – boring – but the marketing eventually hinted that it was a haunted pool – interesting – and on that front the film delivers and expands on a concept that is both simple and a bit hair-brained.  Its saving grace is Charlie Sarroff’s cinematography that shoots in, over, around, and under the pool, covering it from just about every angle imaginable and wringing out every horrific scenario that could play out there. 

It is easy to write off the film whole cloth from the concept – a haunted pool – as a parody of a Stephen King short story who has written everything from haunted cars to haunted pets, and in a rare Family Guy joke that actually landed a haunted desk lamp.  Night Swim, though, as the plot begins to fully reveal itself, has a vein of mysticism running throughout.  Unfortunately, it takes the more cerebral aspects of its story and trades them in for personification in the form of a bloated monster (Mike Avery), that, like the overall lore, scratches at some mythic concepts but does not execute its design in an equally imaginative way.  Built upon an ancient, magic spring, the waters in the pool have the capability to heal the ailments of those who swim, but the water giveth and as such, the water taketh away.  We learn with Eve that the water requires a sacrifice in order to perform its magic and because it healed Ray, the water has now come looking for payment. 

Night Swim though takes its time to get here.  Instead, the film circles a feeling of discomfort in audiences, which to be sure is not a bad thing in a horror film, but it never adds up to anything.  It utilizes the jump scare setups, but time after time where nothing happens, it ends up boring its audience instead of thrilling them so that when the ghosts finally start showing up, we have already checked out.  Again, enough praise can not be given to Sarroff who photographs every conceivable angle of the pool and provides some visual interest to the film through the use of lights and disorienting shot construction, but it is not enough to carry the film when the frights stall. 

The strangest thing about Night Swim is the tone that it is trying to set.  The script is just littered with water-based puns so there is always a silly air about it, and while it can be admired that the cast, especially Russell, really lean into the jokes, they are so uninspired that it is hardly fun. From groan-worthy Marco Polo jokes to an early-on conversation where Eve talks about a childhood memory where life gave her the choice to sink or swim, none of these lines are especially clever and because they are forced into the script, it cheapens the whole experience. Despite having a handful of writing credits to his name already, McGuire insists on these little jokes and cumbersome dialogue instead of just letting the characters speak freely and focusing in on the scares. 

For its faults on the page, Night Swim is still not a bad film, it is just squandered by some fatal creative decisions that do not let it excel in the way it wants to. There is an interesting premise, but with so much front matter to take care of, it is not until late in the film that the pool begins to become a true threat. Elliot’s jealousy over the other boys on his baseball team and Izzy’s secret boyfriend help to pad the runtime and create new scenarios to play out poolside, but instead of really working on integrating these threads into the bigger picture, they become open and shut chapters that do not meaningfully contribute to the film’s end game. The biggest flaw, though, comes more from Universal who decided to release it in January as a bit of seasonal counterprogramming. While August is an equally slow time for exhibitiors as studios offload titles which they are more hesitant about, Night Swim feels like a film that could have really captured an audience in a late summer frame as opposed to a winter weekend.