There isn’t a single scare tactic in Night Swim that isn’t familiar from countless other films. From the start, horror tropes abound: jump scares punctuated by loud noises on the soundtrack; voices emanating from a drain; creepy mud-soaked girls crawling out of the water; promises of ancient curses; computer searches that lead to missing persons; apparitions that disappear the moment they appear; and teary, rain-soaked goodbyes. Except it all happens around a private swimming pool, which here remains about as frightening as a fish tank.
Ray Waller (Wyatt Rusell) is a former third baseman for the Milwaukee Brewers who’s had to swallow the pill of an early retirement after being diagnosed with relapse-remitting MS. His condition is worsening, and, to help keep the family afloat, his wife, Eve (Kerry Condon), takes an admin job at the local public school, which is cheekily named after Harold Holt, the former Australian prime minister whose body was never found after getting lost swimming at sea.
The couple and their two kids, Izzy and Elliot (Amélie Hoeferle and Gavin Warren), have just moved into house in the Minneapolis suburbs, which has a neglected pool in the backyard. Ray’s doctor suggests “water therapy” to help with his MS, which apparently just means doing a lot of swimming, and, much to everyone’s surprise, he starts to beat back the clock. Something about the water is helping him walk without a cane, lift heavy weights, and even swing the bat again. In one goofy scene, he clobbers a baseball so hard that he breaks it and a field light.
But Waller’s path to healing has its drawbacks, as much for the family as for Night Swim’s audience. As is often the case in horror films featuring pets, the family’s cat, Cider, may have been eaten by a ghoulie lurking within the pool. From there, whatever is overtaking the pool starts to get increasingly more aggressive. Soon, everyone in the family is being haunted by voices, and then by fiendish, waterlogged spirits. Most of them are decently frightening, though in one scene where Izzy sneaks into the pool to flirt with a swim teammate, Ronin (Elijah J. Roberts), the water monster unfortunately recalls McDonald’s mascot Grimace.
There’s an elegiac beauty to many of Night Swim’s pool scenes, but everything that surrounds them is leaden, from Russell’s comatose performance to the baseball metaphors that have been unsubtly shoehorned into the impossibly routine narrative. Elsewhere, writer-director Bruce McGuire’s script incongruously gestures at ideas without fully engaging in them. Seemingly one of those is how white suburbia is built on stolen indigenous land, and the brief mention isn’t only jarring but suggests a desperate attempt to bring a modicum of merit to the proceedings.
The film wants to use whatever pathos it generates to explore sacrificial love, but that’s undermined in part by McGuire’s seeming suggestion that living well with a disability isn’t possible. That’s the kind of foot-in-mouth belief that rules the day throughout Night Swim. Notwithstanding Condon’s fantastically vulnerable effort to lift the film around her, it’s hard to take seriously a family that so earnestly traffics in ChatGPT-grade platitudes, like getting back up to the plate after striking out. In such moments, you almost wish that Night Swim’s characters would just stay in the water, where at least they have a harder time speaking.
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