In Night Swim, an American family moves into a new house with a backyard swimming pool – only there is something supernatural lurking beneath the water threatening to pull each of them under. The film marks the feature debut of writer/director Bryce McGuire, and marks the first horror release of Blumhouse and Atomic Monster’s freshly merged relationship. While the film is well shot, with a strong eye for visual imagery and colour, it ultimately fails for a few key reasons. The main one is the poor realisation of its horror elements.

The problem with a cursed or evil swimming pool is that it is a limited source for horror. It can only threaten its victims if they actually jump into the pool. It is unable to drag people in, or pursue them down the street, or sneak up on them in their home or workplace. When the key threat of a horror story amounts to what is essentially an angry hole, it puts an extraordinary weight onto the other elements: the individual characters, the back story, and the production design.

The characters are, for the most part, thinly drawn and unengaging. The actors do their best, but it is ultimately like sewing a coat out of scraps. This leads the film to become a somewhat tedious experience. The viewer is too often left to wait for the next creepy thing to occur, and when it finally does happen the reward is not enough to make the watching worthwhile. While the film admittedly improves as it goes, by the time it properly hits into gear most of its audience will have already tapped out.

At the centre of the story is husband and father Ray Waller, played by Wyatt Russell. A diagnosis of multiple sclerosis has ended his career as a baseball player, and his disease has suddenly shifted from the less serious relapsing-remitting form to the more degenerative secondary progressive. While it is commendable to see MS feature in a film – it is probably the most common disease with almost no onscreen coverage – it is a deep shame that, once again, a representation of disability is made without a person with that disability playing the key role.

If you are a regular reader of these reviews, you might be getting a little bored with how – whenever a film casts an able-bodied actor in a disabled role – I feel compelled to complain about it, and judge the production that does it rather harshly. I can only promise that you are likely nowhere near as bored with the issue as I am. This should not be a difficult issue. With about one in five people experiencing disability, films should and often do include characters with those disabilities. Such representation, however, is hollow and trite if actual people with disability are excluded from the filmmaking process.

Hollywood used to make films in which people of colour were portrayed by white actors in make-up. Excuses were made for it: that there were no black, Asian, or indigenous actors famous enough to play those roles, or that the parts should go to the best actor regardless of their skin colour. We have since collectively recognised the bigotry in those excuses, and by-and-large the industry does not engage in blackface and the like any more. Sooner or later it will recognise the same applies to disability, and a lot of these films are going to become egregiously unwatchable when it does.