Night Swim

Directed by Bryce McGuire, Night Swim follows a family of four, including Wyatt Russell’s Ray and Kerry Condon’s Eve, as they begin to suspect that there’s something very wrong with their swimming pool. Filmmaker McGuire, working from his own screenplay, kicks Night Swim off with a decent yet thoroughly familiar prologue that seems to promise a slow-moving narrative, and indeed, the movie is, for the most part, saddled with as deliberate and uneventful a narrative as one can easily recall – with the arms-length atmosphere, at the outset, generally offset by the compelling, charming efforts of stars Russell and Condon. It’s clear, then, that Night Swim‘s steady descent into irrelevance is triggered by a progressively tiresome midsection devoid, for the most part, of attention-grabbing sequences (with one notable exception an entertainingly (and refreshingly) broad set-piece involving a sinister game of Marco Polo), while the distressing lack of tension paves the way for a fairly interminable final stretch and third act that’s capped off with a thoroughly tedious (and dimly-lit) climax – which does, in the end, cement the picture’s place as a derivative, ineffective endeavor that’s virtually crying out for a more lurid approach (ie this is not a premise best suited for such a morose approach, ultimately).

*1/2 out of ****