The Wallers are a good family in need of a little good news.
They have a lot going for them. Eve, the mom and wife, is solid and loving. And she’s ready to dive into pursuing a new career now that her kids are in their teens.
Sixteen-year-old Izzy is reliable and sincere. Sure, the family’s recent moves and her dad’s health problems have been unsettling. But she’s ready for a fresh start and happy to make new friends. (Particularly those of the good-looking guy type.)
And youngest, Elliot, is a great kid, even though he wishes he weren’t so undersized. He’d like to be a good athlete like his dad and older sis. But in the meantime, he’s ready to help the family and work hard.
Oh, and the dad, Ray, is a pretty good father and a doting husband.
However, it’s his recent problems that have pulled the family down collectively. Ray was a major league baseball player up until recently. Then he got hit with the beginning stages of multiple sclerosis. And everything slid sideways.
That prognosis obviously brings Ray’s playing days to an end. And his family is feeling the pain as well. But the potentially good news here is the fact that the Waller family’s itinerant, baseball-imposed lifestyle will now come to a close.
That’s when that bit of much-needed good news lands in the Waller’s laps.
Ray and Eve stumble upon a large house with a ridiculously inexpensive selling price. Sure, it’s a bit of a fixer-upper, but it has a nice pool in the backyard. And Ray’s therapist recently suggested that water therapy could well help his condition. So, it’s a win-win.
And indeed, when the Wallers buy the property and get moved in, things seem to be going really well. Eve starts classes at a local school. Izzy meets a great guy, named Ronan. And Elliot gets a spot on the school baseball team.
Even Ray’s water therapy workouts in the pool seem to be helping in big ways. His strength is returning. He’s working out with weights again. And when he goes to the high school to help out with Elliot’s practice, he ends up knocking the stitching off a fastball pitched his way.
But there’s one teeny, tiny problem. When the Waller’s chipper realtor sold them that wonderfully underpriced house, she conveniently left out a small, but very important detail. You see, it just so happens that a child once went missing in that backyard pool. And if you dig way back in the area’s history, you’ll find stories about others disappearing in and around the natural spring that feeds that pool.
Oops. This move might not be such great news for the Wallers after all.
The Wallers are a loving family. They work side by side in their new home and help one another in times of need.
When the Wallers are facing the end of Ray’s career and thinking about investing in their new home, Eve tells her husband: “I want us to put down roots. I just want to make sure you want that, too.” Ray assures her that he does want to do that, and he’s ready to move into the next phase of their life together.
In fact, as things appear to be positively progressing in their lives after Ray moves on from baseball, he tells his wife, “Maybe my getting sick happened for a reason.” Eve lovingly replies, “You’ll always be a baseball player. But that’s not all you are.”
Eve declares that they aren’t facing problems alone if they stick together as a family. She puts that belief into practice several times. We also hear a reference to sacrificing for those you love—a foreshadowing of what’s to come later in this increasingly dark story.
There are some definite supernatural happenings surrounding the Waller’s pool. Creepy figures appear in and out of the water. And under certain situations, the water supernaturally extends far deeper than the limits of the pool. People are dragged into those depths and, in two cases, swim into them. Down in that deep water, ghostly figures who have died swim about and clutch at anyone who dives in that deeply. Ghoulish creatures also rise to the pool’s surface on occasion.
We eventually learn that there’s an unexplained mystical aspect to the spring that feeds the pool itself. (It’s home to a contained entity or godlike force.) A possessed individual (controlled seemingly by dark cloudy waters dripping from eyes and mouth) mentions that the spring was “worshiped” at one point in the distant past; it granted deeply desired wishes in exchange for a living sacrifice. Two people are possessed by this watery force.
One spiritual entity in the deep actually helps Eve survive and reach the surface for much needed air.
Since much of the action centers around a large backyard pool, we see the Wallers and other neighbors splashing about in swimsuits. That includes some teen girls in bikinis. There is cleavage exposed on adults and teens. And the camera gazes closely at one teen bikini girl’s backside.
Ray is shown in the shower once, seen from the waist up. Izzy’s boyfriend, Ronan, kisses her.
Though several people (and a cat) die in the dark-watered pool, we don’t directly witness any horrific images (though they are implied). We do, however see creepy creatures—some human-like and others ghoulish and corpse-looking—grasping at people and trying to either drown them or drag them deeper into the water.
There are only two bloody moments in the mix. In one case, Ray is cleaning the empty pool drain when his hand is slashed open by something sharp. And in the other instance, Izzy slips and falls on broken glass. She sits up and pulls a large shard of it out of her palm.
Izzy hits someone repeatedly with a baseball bat. In turn, the young girl gets slapped down and thrown into a wall. A fistful of her hair is ripped out by the roots.
Ray falls into a tarp-covered pool and gets entangled in the tarp underwater, nearly drowning. Two other young people are pulled up from the depths. One of them is choking and gasping for air and has red bruises on his legs where someone was holding him. The other has drowned and requires CPR to resuscitate that character.
We hear a half-dozen uses of the s-word in the dialogue along with one or two uses each of “d–n” and “h—.” God’s name is misused three times. And someone winkingly calls a cat a “pussy.”
It’s possible that some adults at a pool party are drinking alcohol. Someone brings their “jiggly rum cake” to the same gathering, saying, “But this is not for the kids.”
We see several different people vomiting a great deal of foul black water.
Night Swim is based on director Bryce McGuire’s co-directed 2014 short film of the same name. And frankly, one of this film’s plusses is that it nicely captures the eerie-but-crisply filmed look and feel of that earlier four-minute flick.
It also presents audiences with the same splash-in-the-dark, intriguing premise: pulling sinister spirits out of a typically cobwebbed attic and placing them, water-logged and bloated, at the bottom of a deeply shadowed pool.
In fact, I will admit that I cared for the young family at the heart of this pic. I kinda wanted to see how their lives would’ve played out without a ghoulish entity in their pool drain.
But that’s all the credit I can give. For this is one of those horror pics that sets up its haunted otherworld with a set of specific rules and then throws them all away like broken pool toys by its second half.
Yes, for the most part Night Swim keeps really nasty and bloody content chlorinated and tucked away from the camera’s eye. But by the closing credits, even that doesn’t feel like a plus. This pool pic tale is so disjointed and logically murky that no amount of algaecide will help.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
