Review: 'Night Swim' is a less-than-exciting horror movie with actors delivering more than expected

Even with a couple of good actors in the lead — including a recent Oscar nominee — there’s not much to get excited about with “Night Swim,” the latest thriller from the powerhouse horror producers Jason Blum and James Wan.

The Waller family is house-hunting, and seems to find a good one: Roomy, nice neighborhood, and even a pool in the backyard. The dad, Ray (Wyatt Russell), tells his wife, Eve (Kerry Condon, an Academy Award nominee for “The Banshees of Inisherin”), that the pool could be therapeutic — as he deals with a degenerative muscular disease that has derailed his career as a third baseman for the Milwaukee Brewers.

The Waller kids like the idea. The younger one, Elliot (Gavin Warren) sees the pool as a place to bond with his dad, diving for quarters at the bottom. His teen sister, Izzy (Amélia Hoeferle), finds an opportunity to invite a hot boy, Ronin (Elijah Roberts), over for some after-hours water play.

It doesn’t take long, though, for the kids and Eve to notice something’s off about the pool, besides the flickering lights and the fact that the cat has gone missing. Thanks to the prologue director Bryce McGuire and his co-screenwriter Rod Blackhurst devise, the audience already knows what’s wrong — when, in the 1990s, a little girl (Ayazhan Dalabayeva) gets in the water and disappears.

McGuire tries to goose the audience periodically with the requisite jump scares, but ultimately there’s not much to “Night Swim” other than some mild shocks and a lot of references to other movies, such as “It” and “Psycho.” (The strangest homage may be to that well-known not-horror movie, “The Natural.”)

There are flashes, here and there, of where “Night Swim” might have mined richer veins of entertainment. There’s an early scene with a slightly off-kilter pool technician (played by “High Maintenance” creator Ben Sinclair) that promises weirdness that never materializes, and there’s a chilling moment between Condon’s Eve and the missing ‘90s girl’s mother (Jodi Long). The rest of the movie is too watered down, literally, to generate much suspense.

——

‘Night Swim’

★★

Opens Friday, January 5, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for terror, some violent content and language. Running time: 98 minutes.