Neddy Merrill, played by Burt Lancaster in one of his most memorable roles, seems to have been absent for some time. One day, he reappears in swimming trunks at a friend's house and comments that the way from there to his house can be done through the pools that separate them in this upper middle class valley in Connecticut. Neddy decides to swim back to his wife and children in an unexpected, dreamlike and formally surreal odyssey of self-knowledge, in which the pools and their shimmering surfaces, filmed in Technicolour, hide a suburban reality based on appearances.