Movie Review: Swallow

Swallow **** / *****

Directed by: Carlo Mirabella-Davis.

Written by: Carlo Mirabella-Davis.

Starring: Haley Bennett (Hunter Conrad), Austin Stowell (Richie Conrad), Denis O'Hare (Erwin), Elizabeth Marvel (Katherine Conrad), David Rasche (Michael Conrad), Luna Lauren Velez (Lucy), Zabryna Guevara (Alice), Laith Nakli (Luay), Babak Tafti (Aaron), Nicole Kang (Bev), Olivia Perez (Nim), Kristi Kirk (Lillian), Alyssa Bresnahan (Jill), Maya Days (Dr. Santos), Elise Santora (Dr. Reyes), Myra Lucretia Taylor (Nurse), Kathleen Butler (Lydia).

 

Swallow is hardly the first horror film to use pregnancy as a metaphor for the everyday horror of being a woman. Pregnancy makes an easy metaphor here – you now have something growing inside you, feeding off your body, your body is no longer your own, but a vessel for something else, etc. But it is, perhaps, the first horror movie to approach the subject from quite this angle. This isn’t a horror film about a woman whose body slowly becomes not her own – but rather, a horror film about a woman whose body has never been her own, and her gradual reclamation of it. It is a fascinating, subdued, horror film – not full of body or jump scares, of monsters, ghosts or serial killers – but about the everyday horror of having your body controlled.

 

In the film, Haley Bennett stars as Hunter – the beautiful, young, submissive wife of Richie (Austin Stowell), the son of a wealthy family. Hunter comes from a poor, abusive background – we get into some of the reasons for that as the film progresses – and never had control over her life. Now, she’s the wife of a rich dude – living in a beautiful, modernist house. Her husband seems nice – as do his parents – at least as long as they are not crossed. They are rich, and used to people doing what they tell them to. They’re polite to Hunter as long as she continues to act as she should. She gets pregnant – and everyone is happy. But Hunter has a secret – and that secret is she likes to swallow things. She started with a marble, then it expands to more and more strange, even dangerous, objects. Had she not been pregnant, perhaps she could have gotten away with it for a while – but an ultrasound reveals them. Soon, her husband and her family is clamping down more and more on her, controlling her more and more.

 

There is a certain degree in which Swallow resembles the other great horror film of 2020 so far – The Invisible Man, including the fact that eventually, the submissive wife decides to leave – which reveals just how awful her rich controlling husband is. But The Invisible Man is a more traditional horror film – with a more traditional villain, with more traditional beats – but handled pretty much to perfection. Swallow is a quieter film – one that sneaks up on you, and gets under your skin. Part of that is the art direction – that beautiful house, which is also cold and sterile, the sound design, which lulls you into a sense of surreal sleep. The pink hues of the art direction evoke an earlier time. And Bennett’s wonderful, subdued performance – that gives you the sense that at first, even she doesn’t know why she’s doing what she’s doing. It all adds up to evoking a waking nightmare.

 

If I have a problem with the movie, it comes in the last act – where Hunter’s past is laid probably a little too bare, in ways I didn’t find overly convincing. I’m not sure why the person she goes to see is the one she needs to get some sort of closure from – it seems kind of backwards. Yet, the scene unto itself, with Bennett’s increasingly forceful performance, and another wonderful piece of work by character actor Dennis O’Hare sells the scene, at least in the moment.

 

And the very end of the movie works wonderfully well – it may in fact be the only ending that really makes sense. The whole movie is a metaphor for how women have their bodies controlled by the patriarchal society they inhabit. Whatever other way then could the movie end?