Swallow (2020)
Directed by Carlo Mirabella-Davis

Released earlier this year, Swallow is a movie I feel odd even writing about for this website. The early trailers and posters I saw for this film presented it, unquestionably, as a horror movie about a young woman who develops the eating disorder pica, a real disorder wherein people eat things that have no nutritional value and can be harmful to them. When I watched the film, I didn’t immediately know what to make of it because the majority of the movie is what I would call an intense domestic drama, something that doesn’t immediately scream horror to me. Not to be a ‘basic bitch’ or anything, but I prefer my horror to be a bit more fantastical than what we see on display here. After briefly suppressing my desire to only watch movies about slashers and ghouls, I can now acknowledge that Swallow is a fine and well-crafted film.

Swallow is the story of a woman, Hunter, who marries into a wealthy family and becomes pregnant. Although she’s living in a lavish home and has all her basic needs met, Hunter quickly begins feeling trapped and out of control of her own life, which intensifies greatly when she becomes pregnant. As a coping mechanism, Hunter develops the eating disorder pica, and the rest of the film is the strange story of Hunter’s mental state, her odd backstory, and her attempts to regain her own agency.

Swallow is in a lot of ways an understated film. In some movies, this might be a weakness, but for Swallow, this is its greatest strength. Everything feels so mundane and matter of fact, particularly the scenes of abuse, which underscores the disgusting normalcy and commonplace nature of this type of emotional abuse. In the wrong hands, this type of plot could be another Lifetime movie in the week, an ‘I Married A Monster’ sort of deal, but Swallow isn’t that simple. Instead of a personal indictment of ‘oh look how shitty this person is’ there’s more of a cultural indictment, more of a statement about this type of person, or this class of people, as Hunter’s husband’s entire family engages in a practiced form of controlling behavior.

A message like that could become heavy-handed, but Swallow manages to avoid this by delivering quality filmmaking. Where Swallow really shines for me is visually, the use of visual storytelling here is excellent with so much of the story, and Hunter’s place in it, shown wordlessly through how the house where Hunter is living is presented. The prison-like atmosphere is clear but not overdone, and that avoidance of camp comes through perfectly with the performance of Haley Bennett, who brings gravitas and grounding that is essential for this movie to work. Luckily for Swallow, Bennett is excellent and keeps the film working and moving forward, even when things begin to unbalance in the third act.

Something I genuinely enjoyed about Swallow is that I never quite knew where the story was headed, especially when a slight twist takes the narrative in a puzzling direction that I’m still not sure if I enjoyed or not. Whether or not that one plot thread was good, I definitely liked where the story ended up and I found myself much more emotionally invested in Hunter than I expected to be and actually feeling that familiar horror-movie tension when everything began to come to a head. I wouldn’t exactly call the story deep, but it nails the emotional beats, and the emotional beats are what Swallow needed to make this story work so I guess that turned out for the best.

As far as real complaints go, the only thing I could really single out here is how the entire film hinges so strongly on Bennett’s performance. Most other aspects of the movie are somewhere between Fine and Good on the quality scale, but Bennett anchors Swallow so greatly that the film only succeeds because she is here. There are definitely things I liked about Swallow besides her, like the cinematography, set design, and the twisty third act, but with a less charismatic lead this may have all fallen into soap opera territory. Still, Bennett is here, she’s giving her all, and Swallow works. It’s not my typical fare, but I enjoyed Swallow and I would recommend it generally. If you’re into ‘domestic horror’ it is a must-see.