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| Haley Bennett in "Swallow" Photo Credit: Imdb.com |
Hunter is a housewife who spends her days making her home presentable for her neglectful husband, Richie (Austin Stowell). Prompted to add some unexpectedness to her life, Hunter develops a compulsion to consume unsafe objects. When her dangerous obsession is discovered, Hunter is soon encouraged to find the root of her problem.
Bennett, who played a similar character on Tate Taylor’s 2016 thriller, “The Girl on the Train,” finds success once again in portraying someone who has a sense of mystery behind her and wants to break out of the monotony of her life. However, this time around, the circumstances are much stranger, with Bennett displaying the uncertainty and excitement about what she’s doing, going between the two as she keeps the viewer squirming on the edge of their seat as they wait to see if she will go through with her next unsettling ingestion. Other than this, Bennett shows us the sense of entrapment that she experiences every day as she feels stuck in the house, showing the emptiness that overpowers Hunter as she tries to find something to occupy her time and give her a sense of control over something. Although the situation that Hunter gets herself into is life-threatening, you still can’t help but feel sympathetic towards her as Bennett expresses her character’s emptiness in being stuck in a rut, and you also feel a thrill as she takes matters into her own hands in the second half as she tries find out how this obsession came to be.
The screenplay by Mirabella-Davis may have a premise that we’ve seen before, but it’s difficult to resist the draw of wanting to see how this familiar narrative will unfold with its unsettling angle. He writes many instances of tension, whether it be the scenes of Hunter deciding what to ingest; trying to hide her secret from her family; going through the danger of having this obsession potentially take over her life; and confronting the darkness of her past.
As a director, Mirabella-Davis encapsulates the feeling of us seeing the next great director for thrillers. He knows how to keep his viewers in a grip of apprehension as he plays out scenes where Hunter takes part in her obsession, making sure to get as many cringes and bouts of tension out of these sequences and having us wonder how far Hunter is going to take her addiction.
With cinematography by Katelin Arizmendi, Mirabella-Davis is able to emphasize Hunter’s sense of entrapment, with a lot of the movie taking place in a big house. The spaciousness of the interior from which Hunter wishes to escape almost teases her about the wider expanse of the outside world, an aspect that’s made even more prominent when she stands outside and stares into the horizon, viewing the gorgeous scenery and the vibrancy that’s missing from her life.
He also provides terrific details in terms of presenting Hunter as a sort-of ‘50s housewife who lives in a world of people who don’t feel entrapped like she does. While this is done throughout the movie, one such sequence where this is most notable is during a scene at a house party where all of the women have appearances that are more modern, unlike Hunter, all of which shows her potential lack of knowledge of what people are like outside of her home, which further emphasizes Hunter’s isolation from others. These are the sort of subtitles of which Mirabella-Davis has an impressive command, making what could very well become one of the most memorable filmmaking debuts of 2020, and as Hunter begins filling her stomach with harmful objects, you’re sure to feel a knot in yours, one that won’t pass until the film ends.
Grade: A-
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