Swallow and Feminist Horror
Swallow (2020) written and directed by Carlo Mirabella-Davis is a recently released independent film that, through its explorations of theme and tone, positions itself among other contemporary films that represent an ever-pervasive sub-genre in 21st century cinema- feminist horror. Feminist horror films vary wildly in overall plot, depicting gory monsters, intense violence, psychological torment, and many other forms of terror while all remaining connected through their assertion of truthful, honest, and revelatory female experiences. Many of these films, Swallow included, focus the horrors of womanhood within characters that navigate it and exist within it. Like many independent films in general, the subgenre of feminist horror often does not seek to present one single solution or lesson by its conclusion, and rather intends to raise questions or suggest further dialogue in relationship to its content. In other words, womanhood is not something that needs to be solved but something to be explored and understood while battling the sexism that permeates society, heightened within the worlds of horror. In films where social politics are often front and center, filmmakers use metaphor and symbolism freely to implicitly allude to larger conversations without the off-putting density that could come along with such material. With Swallow, Mirabella-Davis accomplishes all of these feminist horror signifiers through the premise of a young housewife who develops pica, or the urge to consume inedible objects.
Hunter (Haley Bennett) is newly married to a young man (Austin Stowell) of intergenerational wealth as an only child to parents that shower him with money, a large house, and job opportunities. They live together on their estate assuming the roles of “breadwinner” and “stay-at-home wife.” Appearing to have no other present family, Hunter’s husband and in-laws are overtly critical and dismissive of her; Hunter’s place in the family is clearly stringent on her submission. Her long days are spent performing various tasks around the house, only after asking her husband’s permission, as her emotional isolation is reflected in the isolation of their home hidden in the woods. She totally inhabits the performative wife role with flawlessly styled hair, plain but attractive makeup, and high-end conservative clothing. Through thoughtful glances and deliberate movement, Bennet’s performance hints to a full inner-life that Hunter is unable to express. After an establishment of Hunter’s general routine and relationship to the people around her, she discovers that she is pregnant, and her husband immediately calls his parents in delight. With his back turned to her, Hunter sits on the couch with a stunned expression and feigned excitement. A few days later, Hunter’s mother-in-law surprises her with a self-help book titled A Talent for Joy that she claims “really helped with the post-partum” after she gave birth, in a tone that feels more accusatory than genuinely kind, and Hunter graciously accepts. While around her husband and in-laws Hunter is pleasant and over-accommodating, but when she is alone, she presents a simmering anger or slip in her control, all captured through lingering close-ups. It is in these moments alone that Hunter starts to fulfill her impending internal journey.
One of the main tenets of Hunter’s new book is “Every day, try to do something unexpected. Push yourself to try new things.” Inspired by these new instructions, Hunter ingests her first inedible object; a small red and white marble. She tenderly holds it up to the light in inspection, and her desire is framed through extreme close-ups of her hazel eyes and the object itself. After placing it on her tongue and exhibiting a deep swallow, Hunter stands alone in both triumph and relief. She is in a good mood for the rest of the day, choosing not to tell her husband about her spontaneity. After this first ingestion, Hunter’s items become more and more risky as she swallows a battery, a tack, and a safety pin. She feels a greater sense of triumph the more painful each item is to go down, satisfying her need for control in an otherwise powerless life. While she slowly broadens her collection of swallowed objects (she keeps them on display on her vanity, Hunter is continuously belittled and deprecated by those around her. In a conversation with her mother-in-law, she is reminded how lucky she is to have met her husband and to be living so lavishly with his money. They laugh about her previous employment in retail and how silly her ambitions of becoming an artist were. This was clearly a ploy for Hunter to repeatedly vocalize how grateful she is to her mother-in-law specifically and their family as a whole. Later, during one of her husband’s drunken get-togethers with colleagues, a man emotionally manipulates Hunter into giving him a hug because he’s “not drunk enough to ask for a kiss.” During this exchange, and subsequent hug, Hunter realizes that she is deprived of the level of emotional intimacy that she apparently needs. She is surprised by her reaction as she settles into the hug, not arising from this particular person but from the act of simple affection she was missing. Who she is thinking about in this moment is unclear, though we understand the “attention” she gets from her husband-- transactional sex and infantilization-- falls short. Throughout this awakening, Hunter has her own controlled secret, an act of agency that is all her own. So, while she can’t control her environment, she can control what goes inside of her body.
When Hunter starts to actively rip out and eat the pages of A Talent for Joy as she’s reading them and the camera slowly pans to reveal her trophy line-up on her vanity that includes a pencil sharpener, sea shell, and chess piece, the real medical issues begin. A routine ultrasound reveals unidentifiable masses in her stomach that then must be removed through endoscopic retrieval. Hunter’s secret is out and she is no longer in charge of her body. The retrieved objects once lodged inside of her now sit in a bloodied line on a medical tray table, a direct opposite to her pristine vanity at home. The next scene is a beratement from her husband as Hunter sits alone in the middle of their bed with limp hair, no make-up, and a loosely worn sweater. Her husband walks in and out of frame throwing insults and abusive language at his silent wife. After a brief silence, Hunter tries to justify her compulsion with “I don’t know [why I did it]. I wanted to do it, so I did it,” as if this is also the first time she's attempting to justify it to herself. This is also the first time we see Hunter project her loss of control in a more public space than inside her own body. She raises her voice at her husband, and after he insists that she should’ve told him about her pica before they were married, in one of the most telling lines of the film, Hunter screams “I didn’t know about it!.” Hunter is not experiencing a transformation of self, but an awakening of self. Her pica, or craving for control, had always been a part of her, always fighting under the surface, and she was now fully aware of it, taking the steps to reveal it.
After the incident with the ultrasound and exposure of her secret habit, Hunter is now less in control of her body than she was before; her husband places her in therapy, only leaving the room when insisted he do so, her mother-in-law institutes a strict juice diet, and her father-in-law demands authority stating “I’m paying for this, so I want results.” They even go so far as to hire an in-house caregiver whose only task is to watch Hunter’s every move and make sure she does not ingest any inedible objects. Hunter has further become a physical and psychological prisoner under the guise of her own safety. Unsurprisingly, she continues to act on her pica compulsions in secret. Her sessions alone with her therapist are the first and only time that Hunter has had the space to articulate her inner thoughts and existence as a person outside of and before her marriage. Though tentative at first, she eventually gives in to the therapeutic process. In one of their sessions, Hunter discusses her family history and relationship to her mother and biological father. Leaning casually against the arm rest of a kelly green sofa, she explains that her mother was raped by a stranger who followed her home from a bar, resulting in her conception. William Erwin was arrested, convicted, and served time in prison for the crime. Hunter then asks if her therapist wants to see a photo of him that she promptly pulls from her purse, clarifying that she has “dealt with it,” and “thought about it a lot.” The entire film is shot in a series of close-up shot/ reverse shots between the two characters, highlighting Hunter’s unsettling nonchalance at such a troubling topic and her therapist’s subsequent disturbance. Hunter’s soft face and bright eyes briefly filling with tears are incredibly jarring in relationship to the conversation at hand.
A few days later over a phone conversation, Hunter’s husband manipulates her therapist into breaking confidentiality and revealing Hunter’s family history to him. Hunter hears this through the bathroom door and after experiencing a severe panic attack, swallows a screwdriver. Her husband and in-laws decide to commit her to a mental health facility when she is released from the hospital to be monitored and watched until the baby is born. She pleads not to go to which her husband threatens divorce. Admitting utter and total abandonment, Hunter escapes before she can be taken away. This sparks her journey to find and confront her biological father as a means of agency in her own identity that she never had before. One of her first acts on her own is calling her husband to explain herself, her newly revealed self, in a clear way that could not be inhibited by his overbearance. When she quietly insists to him that she will not be going back, he becomes angry and calls her an “ungrateful cunt,” his true self also revealed.
Hunter’s confrontation of her father takes place at his birthday party in the house that he shares with his young daughter and wife. The place is adorned in cliché birthday decorations as adults stand around chatting and children scream and play. In context with what Hunter intends to do, this is another clear juxtaposition of innocence and impurity. She slowly reveals to him who she is and watches in quiet amusement as he stammers out a lie to his wife so he and Hunter can speak alone. When he asks what she wants, Hunter responds that she doesn’t know, or rather, hasn’t “decided yet.” Her first question for him, implicitly about raping her mother, is “why.” He responds that it made him feel powerful and in control of one secret only he knew about. On the outside he seemed like a normal person and on the inside felt like a god. His delivery of this explanation forces Hunter to interrogate her own desire for power and complicity in a habit that ruined her established life. She tearfully asks him if he is ashamed of her and if she is like him. It is incredibly hard to watch Hunter ask the one person left in her life that she seeks validation from, given who he is and what he has done. He goes on to insist that she did nothing wrong, it wasn’t her fault, and as she knows, is nothing like him. The film ends with a new presentation of Hunter. She emerges from the public restroom where she just had a medicated abortion in a large t-shirt, jeans, and loose ponytail. She smiles to herself in the mirror and exits the restroom, passing other women who enter. Credits roll as the camera lingers on this shot, anonymous women coming and going within the public space.
Swallow does what many feminist horror films seek to do in making the invisible visible. It manifests the unseen struggles of womanhood into tangible, heightened circumstances. Patriarchal oppression, body dysmorphia, hypocritical expectations, and survival economics are articulated through Hunter and her liberation from the life that wrapped her up so tightly. It seeks revenge and justice for its protagonist while also challenging social ideologies through symbolic details. Giving a voice to otherwise internal feminine struggles can engage in catharsis for viewers, both women and men. I am reminded of other contemporary feminist horror films that are similarly engaging such as Suspiria (remake, 2018), The Nightingale (2018), and Midsommar (2019). In relationship to its independent release, Swallow premiered at Tribeca Film Festival on April 28th, 2019, where Haley Bennett won Best Actress. After IFC acquired the rights for distribution, it was released in the US on March 6th, 2020 to three screens, intending to expand to 38 locations but halted due to covid19 lockdown; however, IFC already had an immediate VoD release planned, so the film is quite a bit ahead of other studios' “theatre only” releases that are now scrambling for next steps as it topped the US box office charts the week of April 10th. Given the current unusual circumstances for the industry, Swallow’s independent film status helped propel it to success in an otherwise devastating time. It’s larger themes of isolation may also be resonating with contemporary audiences in such an unknowable moment.
