Swallow

IFC Films | Release Date: March 6, 2020

6.4	USER SCORE Generally favorable reviews based on 51 Ratings

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Mauro_LanariDec 12, 2020

(Mauro Lanari)
Do they intend to make a movie for every DSM psychopathology? In this case, the director chooses the picacism of an ex-saleswoman who swallows the bitter pills of her previous trauma and her marriage with a husband of superior(Mauro Lanari)
Do they intend to make a movie for every DSM psychopathology? In this case, the director chooses the picacism of an ex-saleswoman who swallows the bitter pills of her previous trauma and her marriage with a husband of superior socio-economic background. The evergreen "This Is the Day" (1983) by "The The" in the soundtrack would have deserved a better fate.… Expand

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hnestlyontheslyMar 23, 2020

This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. It would be easy to call Swallow just one more story about a white woman whose problems would be solved if she just found a goddamn job. The movie admits as much at one point, when a Syrian attendant hired as Hunter Conrad’s live-in prison warden criticizes the triviality of her plot saying, “In a war zone, there is no time for head problems.” There are obvious places where the movie falls short: the tonal shift of Hunter’s disease is all over the place–we’re never quite on solid ground about whether it’s a tool of rebellion against the white, upper class in laws and their veneer of magnanimous geniality, or a Serious Issue that should be treated with ominous piano music. (This second underlying tone to the movie is the reason why I couldn’t find anyone to watch Swallow with me: the idea of watching a movie that romanticizes or makes the object of voyeurism a woman’s weird mental health crisis and subsequent self-harm compulsion was not something of interesting to anyone in my quarantine-blunted social circle.) The effect of the uneven treatment is a little manic, which maybe works as a nice metaphor for the compulsion itself, but doesn’t square especially well with the rape plot that unearths itself late in the 9th inning of this movie with little need and no one’s asking.

Swallow is a movie I’ve been anticipating for a few months, ever since the list of horror films for 2020 came out in January, and someone made mention of a “body horror” film where a young woman develops an obsession with eating household objects. I thought that it would be a spiritual sequel to one of my favorite body horror films, Raw (2017), which plays with cannibalism as a metaphor for the taboos of a young woman coming of age in university. But Swallow has its sights set on different taboos, with less of a–for lack of a better word–bite and less of a target. Strawmen abound in director Carlo Mirabella-Davis’s imagining of the sterile, high-class life of a kept woman.

Haley Bennett is radiant in her throwback dresses, her slack-jawed pawing at her cellphone games while waiting for her husband to come home from work, and her effortless lies small and large. The aesthetic feels like an assault (or maybe an homage, or maybe a sendoff?) on the color palette and spirit of shows like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and directors like Wes Anderson, who prize organization and tidiness, sometimes at the cost of deeper commentary about the patriarchal violence required to enforce that tidiness (I promise that I’m not really interested in using the phrase “patriarchal violence” more in this discussion, but it feels like Mirabella-Davis might have more to say about this).

Bennett’s role is difficult, because so much of her stageplay has to do with dissembling her true emotions. Her face is a cypher for so much of the movie–and at times it seems clear that she’s putting on a show of looking purposefully dim as a defensive technique–but she does an excellent job of projecting internal strife through her eyes, the sensuality of release when she gives in to her initial compulsions, and its commonplace balming effect by the end when she’s shoveling dirt down her throat. (The moments when she’s eating dirt are actually some of my favorite, because it’s so obviously brownie dust and she eats it with such gusto. A lot of the other objects she ingests are practical effects and require quick camera cuts, which makes them a lot less satisfying to watch.) The longer we spend with Hunter and her dirtbag husband Richie (ugh, the pun is bad), the more I liked the movie and the more thoughtful I thought the indictment of liberal progressive hypocrisy about gender roles in committed relationships, which is why it felt overly long when the film tumbled out toward the end as Hunter confronts her father at his birthday party.

I am convinced after watching this movie that it was probably never supposed to be much more than a character study with a lot of oddly beautiful bloody bathroom and tracheotomy shots. It was still entertaining to watch in two sittings and probably will feel like a fun film to look back on in Haley Bennett’s career once her next role in Hillbilly Elegy flings her back into the limelight.… Expand

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