Movie Review: She’s Got an Appetite for Obstruction in "Swallow"

Gulp. Here’s a horror-drama that might bring your lunch back up.

An expectant mother develops a taste for marbles, pins and worse in Swallow, a challenging body horror flick some will find unpalatable, but is worth ingesting.

Co-producer Haley Bennett plays Hunter, a cooped-up housewife who spends all day waiting for her finance bro of a husband (Austin Stowell) to return home. (Besides the literal interpretation of the title, it also reminded me of the kept woman in Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House, nicknamed "little bird". It has fittingly gone straight to streaming in Australia during the coronavirus pandemic, while we’re all caged at home due to self-isolation anyway.)

After learning she’s pregnant, Hunter begins decorating their sterile mansion in preparation for the incoming baby. She also starts swallowing random items. First, a marble. Then, with great difficulty, a tack. And then, in a cheery montage, we see all the unimaginable items she’s swallowed, expelled, cleaned and collected. Her happy new habit is interrupted by a sonogram revealing her stomach’s contents, and her husband’s heavy-handed family intervenes. They passive-aggressively demand compliance, and the audience flinches on her behalf, hoping she escapes their clutches, while still wishing she would stop choking down screwdrivers. It’s hard to know what a happy ending would look like in Swallow, and the one it gives us is indeed confronting. No one said this would go down smooth.

Besides A Doll’s House, it seems that Swallow is indebted to the films of Julianne Moore, specifically Far From Heaven (itself a pastiche of the tightly-coiled melodramas by Douglas Sirk) and Safe (about a society woman who starts manifesting strange symptoms and finds herself allergic to modern life). It’s also it’s own thing entirely. Writer-director Carlo Mirabella-Davis keeps the camera unnervingly still, framing Hunter’s isolation in maddening, vomitous red hues. Certainly, watching Bennett chew on something that will shred her insides is stressful enough. However, Mirabella-Davis’ unmoors the audience most successfully by having the camera suddenly, and only occasionally, switch to handheld as it races to the kitchen as Hunter lurches for her next awful meal. It's not horror in the traditional sense, but it's horrifying.

I was concerned, in the early going, that it was too apparent too quickly that Hunter was not mentally well, hardly giving us a chance to see her slow transformation (a’la Safe). Bennett nonetheless reveals she still has plenty far to take her unusual, softly spoken and sadly damaged character, resulting in a final act that demonstrates the depths she’s been taken to (and is willing to travel). She’s remarkable.

Hunter’s eating disorder exists in the real world. Called pica, it’s most common in pregnant women (if uncommon, generally). Yet the real reason Hunter seeks personal autonomy through her diet is slowly parceled out as the film proceeds. It builds to an extremely surprising climax, opposite the great actor Denis O’Hare (in a role I won’t spoil). Having them discuss the limits of their control is a powerful swing by Mirabella-Davis, especially in his feature debut. But if he didn’t want to make audiences squeamish, he wouldn’t have filmed his leading lady shovelling soil down her throat by the handful.

4/5

Swallow is rated MA15+. It is now available to stream on Stan and Foxtel Go.