France, USA
2019 95 mins OV English
“Deeply unsettling… A bold and unconventional thriller”
- Peter Debruge, VARIETY“A provocative and frequently brilliant thriller about the patriarchal control over female bodies”
- David Ehrlich, INDIEWIRE“A staggering accomplishment in its storytelling, visuals, and performance”
- Lena Wilson, THE PLAYLISTHunter rolls the hard, cold glass surface of a marble over her tongue. With a hint of the forbidden, there is rebellion and desire rooted in the way she runs it across her teeth. It doesn’t crowd her mouth, but it feels full. Wouldn’t it be spontaneous to just swallow it? And she does. In Carlo Mirabella-Davis’s film
SWALLOW, Bennett stars as a meek housewife who finds out she is pregnant. With a blonde bob and a retrofitted closet, she is meekly subservient to the wants of her new husband and his wealthy family. Gentle, caring and shy, she aspires towards acceptance by way of total and complete self-annihilation. She spends her long, lonely days in an isolated gilded cabin, where she struggles to find purpose and meaning. That is, until she begins swallowing a variety of household objects, which offer her a sense of control.
Written and directed with a biting sense of humour by Carlo Mirabella-Davis,
SWALLOW is a film with a soft pastel glow, and Hunter is dressed up as just another object in her husband’s perfectly designed home-retreat. The space never seems quite her own, except the row of small objects she begins to accumulate that have made their way through her digestive system. Haley Bennett (
THE HAUNTING OF MOLLY HARTLEY and
HARDCORE HENRY) gives a career-defining performance as Hunter. Like beams of fractured light, there is a slow unveiling of Hunter’s troubled past and the various ways trauma has a way of repeating itself. The world itself is alienating and her struggles to maintain order and to assimilate are consistently met with harshly toned reprisals. A film that will pique anxieties and turn stomachs (someone fainted at the Tribeca screening),
SWALLOW is a surprisingly tender look at the echoes of abuse and the lengths one woman will go to affirm her identity.
– Justine Smith
