Major league baseball player Ray Waller has been forced into early retirement by a degenerative illness. He and his wife Eve are after a new start for them and their two kids, teenager Izzy and Elliot. They find a house that the Realtor didn’t tell them about and decide to check it out. The potential abode has a low price tag, plenty of room, and gosh a decent sized swimming pool. On the bright side its near Eve’s new job as an Administrator at the local school, because as we all know retiring major league WAGs are definitely into working for low incomes. Naturally they buy the house and then their troubles begin. Seems the pool is haunted, due to being feed by underground springs or something, and the haunting isn’t of the mild rattling chains type, we’re talking gifts given and required sacrifices. 

So the movie is clearly aimed at Teens, the traditional hunting ground of Hollywood horror, but seriously McGuire really thought a haunted swimming pool was going to resonant? The Director/Writer has helmed a couple of shorts previously, Every House is Haunted (2023) and Soon You Will Be Gone and Possibly Eaten (2016), and of course helmed and wrote the disaster that was Unfriended (2018). McGuire is clearly hip with what the kids are into, or as hip as Hollywood ever get, and his pass culminated Night Swim, a movie that is so abysmally bad that even teens decided to go check something else out, rather than wasting money on this water logged dud. Even worse funding arrived curtesy of the Government of New South Wales, Australia, who should clearly be kept away from any involvement in the movie industry. It’s not like we have major problems with housing, environment, house hold inflation, and a myriad of other issues, nope nothing to see here let’s throw money down the toilet of a poor foreign movie. Whoever is making decisions on what should be funded movie wise in the NSW trough of overindulgence should be looking for a new job!

Naturally Blumhouse had their grubby mitts on the movie, you can pretty much tell immediately. There’s nothing new happening, the jump scenes have by now been so done to death that they are no longer jarring the audience into staying awake, the characters are at best cardboard cut-outs, and aspects of the plot are developed and then go nowhere. Worse, this movie, if I am being kind, pays homage to a bunch of previous movies, or if I wanted to be real is simply regurgitating everything it can lay its hands on. If you have seen Jaws (1975) then you will recognise numerous water scenes, the good old something is behind you but not there when you look – is there a teen horror flick that doesn’t poop out this trope currently, and of course the haunted house, or pool in this case, with a bad history the currently family need to uncover. Naturally McGuire bollocked the requirements, sorry searching the library of the local newspaper office for info about a supposed haunted house, as he really doesn’t know which beast he has by the horns. So kids, don’t expect anything new, we have all been done this tarmacked path previously, numerous times.

Guess I should get through the major characters, before talking about what passes for a plot here. Ray Waller is defined by being a former professional baseball player who is trying to regain past glories and is surprised by the therapeutic properties of his swimming pool and becomes obsessed. Think Jack Torrance, The Shinning Kubrick version, but without the character development King or Kubrick added to fill in their character study. Eve Waller is an administrator at the local school, and that’s about her covered, she is also a house Frau, be still my giddy heart. As for the kids, seriously had to look up their names, Izzy is surprisingly a non-petulant teen chick who manages to look about twelve throughout. Oh and she has a love interest with the cool dude at school, who is not surprisingly black, hey those DEI points are not scoring themselves. And Elliot is a non-descript young guy looking for approval from dad. About the only member of the family scoring points here is Cider the moggy, who acts just like a feline for the limit screen time the kitty gets.

Oh there are some support characters, don’t really care to be honest, we get for example the female Realtor who knows more about the history of the haunted abode than she mentions, who later has to come clean about the history of mysterious drowning deaths and missing persons. Actually Night Swim does a better job with this character than either of the Amityville Horror movies. Hey I found a positive. There’s a baseball coach etc., but it’s not like the audience is remotely interested.

I’m actually going to give scribes Bryce McGuire and Rod Blackhurst a pass mark here, sure the movie is by the numbers – don’t expect anything coming from left field, but just what the hell were you supposed to do with a haunted swimming pool, heat it and have someone boil to death? Hey idea for the sequel, I can supply my bank details Blumhouse. Things progress, there’s every trope they can shoe horn into the script, and the bland white bread fam are the bland white bread fam who suddenly have chaos descend into their boring middle class lifestyle.

Behind the camera director Bryce McGuire isn’t risking anything. We get fast cuts, the usual shock scenes that apparently teens desire – which isn’t something I’ve really noticed the teens in my circle of hell are screaming out for, and all deaths happening off screen. This is strictly by the numbers and McGuire doesn’t paint outside the lines, but end of day the movie presents as blah, just another flick thrown into the meat grinder of teenage rampage. I will say the night time scenes were well constructed and the viewer isn’t forced to squint to see what is going down, a mistake a lot of horror Directors make.

Safe and by the numbers is the best I can say about this movie, and seriously a haunted swimming pool, the premise has the movie drowning not waving to begin with. Not entirely sure what I was expecting here, given it had the name Blumhouse in the credit not a lot to be honest, but whatever thoughts I had going in were overwhelmed by blandness that I sat through. There’s no substance here, it is a by the numbers flick whose primary purpose is to separate teens from their hard earns without upsetting the parental units. There’s no subplots, a barely existing exploration of the human condition, and a plot that is so threadbare that it was fraying at the edges before the movie was released to a bored audience. No recommendation, this is horror by the numbers, nothing new, no risks being taken, cinema fodder. I would have liked to say the waters fine, dive on in, but to be honest we are in the kiddies paddling pool here.