All it takes is some of the most anxiety-inducing click-clack-clicking of fingers typing on an iPhone that you’ll ever hear to empathize with the emotionally claustrophobic position of Haley Bennett’s Hunter in “Swallow.” She sports the hairdo and quiet presence of a housewife from the 1950s, but domestic surrender to her careless husband and in-laws isn’t the primary intention for director Carlo Mirabella-Davis in his feature debut—it’s the foundation for one of the more viscerally unsettling psychological thrillers that’s come about in recent years, an examination of how we cope with a loss of control and the hypnotic power objects can hold over us.
Despite his insistence otherwise, Hunter is more accessory than life partner to her husband, Richie (Austin Stonewell), who barely acknowledges her existence except when he needs someone to blame for his wrinkled tie. There’s a pungent early air of foreboding in “Swallow,” as well as of imprisonment within the concrete-and-glass walls of a lakeside home. The location may be serene, but what goes on inside is Hunter’s quiet desperation for any semblance of control over her station.
The relationship feels downright abusive, and Bennett’s chillingly excellent performance as a woman shackled by judgement goes a long way toward making the viewer understand what she may be getting out of a habit that’s easy to imagine as horrific in any other context, and perhaps this one as well: Consuming small objects decidedly not made for consumption. After gulping down a marble, a tack or a battery, there’s a release that plays out on Bennett’s face. The shackles, it seems, are briefly loosened.
On the surface level, these scenes are as uncomfortable as anything I’ve seen on the big screen in recent years, and Mirabella-Davis maximizes the sensation with a cacophonous style of filmmaking; his cinematographer, Katelin Arizmendi, and sound team conspire to create some unimpeachably bone-chilling sequences. If you have to look away, I wouldn't blame you.
But it’s not Hunter’s behavior so much as the implications that “Swallow” extrapolates a particularly cruel uneasiness from. Hunter is fully aware of obvious hazardous side effects – one particularly stomach-turning sequence puts them center stage – but her willingness to submit to the strange impulses adds shades of complexity to a relationship that is familiar in how emotionally off-white it is. We see uncomfortable marriages played out all the time on screens large and small; see “The Invisible Man,” which came out just last month.
What makes “Swallow” memorable is its ability to marry daring specificity with primal compulsion. Arizmendi frames the most harmless of objects – a dollop of sauce, a cup of ice – so the viewer is pulled into the same suffocating trance that Hunter has been…willfully drawn into? Lost in? It isn’t clear. But there’s either a romanticism or a terror in the mundane way the camera and Hunter perceives these objects as they sit on a counter, and later in a neat row after they've traveled through her body. The difference is never split.
There’s a touch of Julia Ducournau’s “Raw” in the way “Swallow” portrays Hunter’s urges. In both movies, queasy behavior is depicted in sensual light, but Hunter’s and Justine’s motivations differ. It becomes clear for the former when “Swallow” reveals itself to be a bit of a chameleonic work; one of the things Mirabella-Davis does most effectively is using aesthetics to make us understand the emotional fulcrum of Hunter’s situation. Pastel colors can give way to malicious shadows as Nathan Halpern’s score swings between menace and pleasantness. Bennett’s performance keeps the form-shifting from becoming a nuisance, helping us clue into not only what it takes to get to the fleeting moments of respite, but also what it is about her past – and very existence – that may explain her psychology.
So sharply in focus is the movie’s intent – much like the porcelain features of Bennett’s face – that when the movie’s daring final third begins, you’re fully locked into Hunter’s journey. It becomes less about keeping her head above water and instead about commandeering the tide, and I was more than a little surprised (pleasantly so) at how willing “Swallow” was to evolve its story. Climaxes and turning points were reached quicker than I expected, even for a 90-minute movie, and even as he tightly embraces well-worn themes of gender superiority complexes, Mirabella-Davis fashions the unique hook of his narrative into something even sharper, incisive and definitive than what we’ve seen. At the same time, Bennett pulls at the threads of Hunter’s mind that separates submission from liberation with startling poise and tantalizing emotion—what’s eventually uncovered is one of the year’s best performances so far, and a transformation bordering on the cathartic and triumphant.
Cathartic and triumphant is how I’d describe the movie’s final moments as well, as Mirabella-Davis brings Hunter’s journey full circle in smart and satisfying ways. If, as the saying goes, you are what you eat, then the ending of “Swallow” makes Hunter as much of a modern feminist heroine as Lisbeth Salander. It’s enough to linger in your mind for a while, and enough to have me anticipating – with wide, keen, terrified eyes – whatever Mirabella-Davis does next.
"Swallow" is rated R for language, some sexuality and disturbing behavior
Starring: Haley Bennett, Austin Stowell, Denis O'Hare, Elizabeth Marvel
Directed by Carlo Mirabella-Davis
2020
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