NIGHT SWIM

*CUT TO THE CHASE*

NOTE: This spoiler was submitted by Jeremy

1992 – A little girl named Rebecca Summers (Ayazhan Dalabayeva) looks outside her bedroom window and sees a toy boat in the pool. She goes to her very sick brother Tommy (Joziah Lagonoy) and promises to retrieve it for him. Rebecca tries to use a pool net to grab the toy, but a force pulls her into the pool. When she tries to get the boat again, the force pulls Rebecca down into the water, and only her bunny slipper resurfaces.

Present Day – The Waller family – parents Ray (Wyatt Russell) and Eve (Kerry Condon), plus kids Izzy (Amelie Hoeferle) and Elliot (Gavin Warren) – are looking for a new house to move into. Ray was a professional baseball player whose career was cut short due to a degenerative illness. The Wallers check out the home that once belonged to the Summers family, with the pool being closed off. As Ray tries to retrieve something that fell in, he gets pulled into the water and struggles to get himself out before his family finds him and calls 911. At the hospital, Ray tells Eve that he thinks the house with the pool would be good for him so he can practice water immersion therapy.

The family moves in and the kids start their new school, with Izzy meeting a boy named Ronin (Elijah Roberts) and developing a crush on him. The Wallers later clean out the pool, but when Ray sticks his hand down the drain, something cuts deep into his palm. The pool maintenance crew comes to check it out, and the family is told that the water comes from a nearby spring.

Once the pool is ready, the Wallers put it to good use, and Ray claims to start feeling better from his therapy. When Eve uses the pool by herself at night, she thinks Ray is standing above her while she is underwater, but when she resurfaces, he is nowhere to be found. Later, the family cat Cider goes missing after standing over the pool and hissing at whatever he saw underwater, which leads to the Wallers installing a cover.

Elliot uses the pool by himself. When he goes underwater, he sees a bunch of coins being thrown in and thinks Izzy is bothering him, but he doesn’t find her outside when he resurfaces. He overhears Rebecca’s voice calling to him, asking for her mom. She appears to give Elliot a toy back to him, but when he grabs it, a hand reaches out and grabs his arm, though he manages to escape. He runs to tell Eve about it, but they find nothing or nobody around. When Eve tells Ray about it, he seems to dismiss Elliot’s fear as just him being kind of a wimp.

Ray joins Elliot and the other kids at a little league practice since his illness appears to be going into remission. While attempting to swing, Ray does fall down, but he picks himself back up before others can help him. When the ball comes for him again, he hits the ball so hard that he not only breaks the ball, but hits it hard enough to send it flying into one of the lights. Everyone cheers him on, but Elliot appears concerned.

Izzy invites Ronin to the pool while her parents are out. They start to play Marco Polo, but after a while, Izzy cannot hear Ronin or the music they are playing. A growling voice responds to Izzy, and a grotesque bloated creature pulls her underneath. Izzy manages to swim back up to find Ronin after what he says were just seconds of her being underwater. After seeing that she is not feeling well, Ronin leaves after kissing Izzy. Elliot then confides to his sister that he has also seen something scary in the pool.

The Wallers host a pool party with most of the people in the neighborhood. In the house, Eve talks to the realtor who sold them the house, and she admits to not having disclosed the case of Rebecca’s disappearance, which is why others that lived there before the Wallers never used the pool. Outside, Ray gets a kid named Ty (Aivan Uttapa) to join him in a game of Chicken agaist another man and child. After they win, Ray starts moving backwards into the deep end of the pool unwittingly while still latched onto Ty so that he cannot let go. A misty grey cloud appears from the drain and enters Ray’s mouth. Elliot sees Ty flailing in the water and runs to get his mom before Ty’s dad jumps into the water to get his son. Ray is pulled out of the water after appearing unconscious.

Growing more concerned, Eve does research into the previous residents of the house and found that others before Rebecca had disappeared without a trace. She manages to track down the residence of the Summers family and finds Rebecca and Tommy’s mother Kay (Jodi Long), who is suffering from a similar illness to Tommy. She tells Eve that Tommy is now healthy and running for senator. Eve asks Kay about the pool and Rebecca, and after dodging the questions, Kay tells Eve the truth. The water from the pool comes from an ancient well that people would come to for wishes, but the entity in the water demands a sacrifice in return. Kay’s wish was for Tommy to get better, and Rebecca became the sacrifice. She is now possessed by the entity and starts to regurgitate and tear up black water. Eve realizes her children are in grave danger and rushes back home.

At night, Izzy and Elliot are left home alone. Elliot goes outside when he thinks he hears Cider by the pool. When he tries to reach for his cat, one of the pool demons spooks Elliot and makes him fall into the pool, and the cover starts to close itself. In the house, a possessed Ray starts to attack Izzy. She fights her father while Eve jumps into the pool to save Elliot. The other spirits of the pool’s victims, including Rebecca, start trying to pull them under, but Eve fights her way out to save Elliot. After Izzy subdues Ray, she and Eve try to get through to him so he can fight the entity. He pukes up the black water, and Elliot regains consciousness. However, when they try to take him to the hospital, the entity starts to attack Elliot from inside. Realizing the entity will not let them leave without a sacrifice, Ray walks into the pool to save his family, letting the entity take him. Elliot ends up freed from the entity’s hold on him.

While the family mourns Ray for his sacrifice, they decide to stay at home instead of moving away again to make sure nobody else has to deal with the entity. Eve, Izzy, and Elliot then bring in a crew to fill it up with dirt to bury the pool for good.

The Waller family - Ray, Eve, Izzy, and Elliot - move into a home with a pool that has been unused for over 30 years. Ray, a former professional baseball player whose career was cut short due to a degenerative illness, starts to use the pool for physical therapy, and it appears to be working on him. However, Eve, Izzy, and Elliot all end up experiencing strange and terrifying sights when using the pool.

After an incident where Ray and another child at a party nearly drown in the pool, Eve does research and learns that past residents of the house have also disappeared because of the pool. She finds one of the previous residents, Kay Summers, whose daughter Rebecca was taken by the entity in the pool. Kay explains the the water in the pool comes from a spring that was used for centuries to grant wishes, but the entity in the water demands a sacrifice in return, and Rebecca was the sacrifice since Kay wished for her son to be healed of his illness.

Ray becomes fully possessed by the entity and attacks Izzy while Elliot is being pulled into the pool by the entity. Eve saves him before she and Izzy get through to Ray to break his possession. When they try to take Elliot to the hospital, the pool entity starts to possess him, so Ray chooses to sacrifice himself to save his family and let himself be taken.

Eve, Izzy, and Elliot mourn Ray and choose to not move away so that nobody else has to deal with the entity. They fill it with dirt for good measure.