I don't mean to brag, but let me tell you: when I was but a wee bonny lass, I choked on a watermelon Jolly Rancher. At this point I don't remember whether the watermelon Jolly Rancher went up or down, but it obviously did one or the other for I am still here to recount this incredible tale. For some seconds though--I am unsure how long, exactly, but it felt like an eternity--I experienced pure, abject terror. Perhaps you know the feeling, when something gets lodged in your throat for a moment and there is an immediate, primal panic. I didn't think much of my brush with mortality at the time but the trauma lingers still! I haven't had a Jolly Rancher since, watermelon or otherwise, because what if it happens again? Further, what if what is lodged cannot be dislodged? Dying is one thing, but having DIED FROM A WATERMELON JOLLY RANCHER written on your tombstone is quite another.
Anyway. Those primal feelings flared up several times during Swallow. Whenever pregnant, unhappy housewife Hunter (Haley Bennett) opened her mouth and crammed something into her gullet, I cried "NO! Girl, it will not fit!" (Really took me back to my college days hahahaeeeehhhhh.) Swallowing a small marble? The idea makes me extremely uncomfortable, but okay, maybe it's do-able. But she works her way up to, like, Precious Moments figurines or whatever and I practically broke out in hives every time, yet I wondered how far she would go. Was she like the man from Mars in Blondie's "Rapture"? Would she eat Cadillacs, etc, and then, when there's no more cars would she go out at night and eat up bars, where the people used to meet? What about after she'd eaten the last guitar? Would she become another Dark Phoenix and take to consuming the very stars themselves?
Well, of course not. That trajectory is for another film, or perhaps for your Swallow fanfiction, if you are so inclined. This film isn't even the shocking, cringeworthy body-horror something something the trailer had me (and maybe you) thinking it would be. Writer/director Carlos Mirabella-Davis is more interested in unpacking the reasons why a woman might suddenly feel a compulsion to, you know, swallow random tchotchkes. What begins as essentially your standard housewife ennui tale gets even deeper into both the nitty and the gritty as Hunter's past is revealed and her pica threatens her life and everything in it. I am always here for depictions of housewife ennui, don't get me wrong. I will eat up anything from classics à la Jeanne Dielman to the bonkers, pea soup-laden Exorcist rip-off Beyond the Door; I'm in particularly if the films get all "good for her" and explode the heteronormative, nuclear family paradigm. I'm in particularly particularly if the film adds a nice zest of class warfare to get my "eat the rich" senses tingling. Swallow does all of this in spades, and it's anchored by a terrifically nuanced performance by Haley Bennett and Katelin Arizmendi's lush cinematography. Ultimately, though, I find it curious that this film didn't really resonate with me. Despite the fine time I had, I was never particularly emotionally invested, though I wanted to be. Was there a detachment in Mirabella-Davis's filmmaking that kept me at arm's length, or is it simply that my heart is as hard as a watermelon Jolly Rancher?
