Night Swim

What Jaws did for the beach, Night Swim wants to do for backyard pools. But instead of a bigger boat, this supernatural thriller needs a better script.

While some scattered frights keep it afloat, jump scares overwhelm genuine suspense whenever the action in this waterlogged genre exercise shifts to dry land.

Ray (Wyatt Russell) is a former professional baseball star whose career was cut short by injuries and the onset of multiple sclerosis. Relocating to Minnesota, he finds a suburban home to share with his supportive wife, Eve (Kerry Condon), along with their teenage daughter (Amelie Hoeferle) and younger son (Gavin Warren).

They selected the house in part because of the expansive outdoor swimming pool, which initially proves helpful in Ray’s physical therapy — with an eye on possibly returning to the field. A contractor shares that the pool water is spring fed, which is unusual, but doesn’t cause any alarm.

As the family becomes acclimated to the neighborhood, they each take turns with solo swims after dark, which prompts strange visions both from the drain and the deck. Are they being terrorized by demons or evil spirits? Eve’s deep-dive into the property and the pool itself reveals a history of tragedy that suggests something more sinister.

The film crafts some haunting imagery while relying on cheap thrills from the usual array of flickering lights, musical crescendos, hallucinations, and shadows. However, the attempt to prey upon common fears and paranoia rarely yields a more visceral psychological horror.

Along the way, the contrived screenplay by director Bryce McGuire — adapted from his 2014 short film — struggles to generate meaningful suspense with a flimsy narrative logic built more on convenient naivete than emotional authenticity.

In other words, the characters never seem real enough to invest deeper sympathy, which results in the film’s most critical thrills merely skimming the surface. Periphery roles come and go at random, and the film seems too eager to adhere to formula rather than subvert genre tropes.

There aren’t many surprises within the underlying mythology, the muddled intricacies of which are revealed without enhancing the climactic terror. As a result, Night Swim remains stuck in the shallow end.

Rated PG-13, 98 minutes.