‘Night Swim’: The Haunted Swimming Pool Movie is Surprisingly Good!
From the Stephen King school of what-object-can-we-haunt comes Night Swim, this year’s annual first-weekend-in-January horror movie. Yes, it really is about a family that moves into a new house and encounters a haunted swimming pool. That’s the kind of concept inevitably preceded by “proof of” in someone’s enthusiastic pitch meeting, and sure enough, this 98-minute movie began its life as a short film that, sans credits, runs about as long as a typical trailer.
Still, it’s not as if the short leaves the feature-length Night Swim with no place to go; the original version’s glimpsed specter doesn’t even get in the water! To expand upon this glorified teaser, director and co-writer Bryce McGuire (along with Rod Blackhurst, co-director of the short, who has a story credit here) have concocted a pair of backstories—one for their pool-vexed family, the other for the pool itself.
Further details about the pool story, a loopy bit of mythology that’s like paved-over folk horror, would drift into spoiler territory. The family strife, though more familiar, is surprisingly and pleasingly specific: Ray Waller (Wyatt Russell) is a major-league baseball player forced out of the game by a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, so he and his wife, Eve (Kerry Condon), attempt to make the best of the situation by putting down roots in a more permanent home. They can pay more attention to their kids, teenage Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle) and younger Elliot (Gavin Warren), while Ray focuses on his health, rather than the sports career that has defined him to this point.