REVIEW: Night Swim - soggy horror offers moderately effective chills

Night Swim probably ought to be an awful lot more scary than it actually is, but it still manages to be pretty unsettling – the rather bizarre tale of a haunted swimming pool. The preamble shows a little girl tempted from her bed – and to her doom – by a little red boat whizzing around in the swimming pool outside in the darkness. You know that the latest family in the house – many years later – are in trouble when the little red boat makes a reappearance.

The gist is that Ray Waller (Wyatt Russell), his wife Eve (Kerry Condon), their teenage daughter Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes) and their young son Elliot (Gavin Warren, Fear the Walking Dead) are the new incumbents, never having thought to research the house’s – and in particular the pool’s – ghastly history. But in fairness, the estate agent – perhaps the scariest of all the characters – doesn’t exactly do them any favours either. Surely she must have known something. She certainly does by the time she gets invited to their ill-fated pool party. She now knows that something awful had happened there but insists she didn’t want to mention it earlier for fear of “putting poo in the pudding” – something of an understatement in all the circumstances. Meanwhile dad Ray is on a roll. Having been forced into early retirement as a major league baseball player by a degenerative condition which is slowly crippling him, he discovers weirdly there is something powerfully regenerative about the pool behind his new home. He casts aside his stick; the docs marvel at the reversal of his bodily damage; and after hitting it out of the park at his son’s baseball practice, you sense he’s dreaming of a return to the game. But one man’s meat is another man’s poison. For all the good it’s doing dad, the pool is doing absolutely nothing for the children. The son starts to hear the voice of the dead girl coming out of the vents; and the daughter gets dragged to the murky depths. Soon Eve tumbles to the sense of danger; but an hour in, Ray is still in denial.

It’s an intriguing premise and there is a degree of restraint in the build-up which makes it fairly effectively disturbing. You sense something truly nasty is getting ever closer, and of course it duly arrives in the end in a closing ten minutes or so which probably tumble perhaps just a little bit too far on the side of silly. But then again, this was never going to end awfully sensibly – and maybe the film is more about the mounting sense of threat, something it pulls off reasonably well. There are times when the dialogue is pretty leaden, but the watery camera angles are nicely done. As a film it’s nowhere near as soggy as some people are saying, and it was certainly never aiming at high art anyway. But while the spirits might haunt the pool down the decades, the film itself isn’t going to stay with any of its audiences terribly long. It’s moderately effective while it lasts, but will be quickly washed away by whatever you happen to be doing next.