Swallow

A staggering accomplishment in its storytelling, visuals, and performance.

Denis O’Hare delivers a heart-stopping performance as Hunter’s unlikely father figure, but this is Bennett’s show. She is luminous and her journey from beautiful, broken housewife to clear-headed woman, grabbing handfuls of soil from a parking lot to snack on later, is thrilling. It’s a role you can imagine a young Isabelle Huppert playing, and there’s no higher praise than that.

It’s a film with women in mind, and one that does not judge their choices when it comes to the health of their own bodies and their own minds.

There’s a touch of “The Invisible Man” to this unsettling story of the misery of being married to a cruel control freak. But “Swallow,” for all its People Magazine psychoanalysis, is harrowing in different ways and gripping in its myopia. All Hunter has is this mania for “control” of one thing in her life — what she puts in her mouth. All we have is worry over her mental health, and discomfort in confronting it.

While "The Invisible Man" was built around its clever set pieces rather than its characters, Swallow is led by its protagonist’s mental and emotional state. It takes place in a landscape that’s largely internal — but that’s territory that can be just as filled with darkness and dread as a forbidding mansion.

Given how nauseating it is to watch Hunter perform increasingly perilous acts of self-harm in her prison of a mansion, neither the payoff nor the psychology behind her actions makes Swallow an illuminating enough addition to the woman-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown genre.

The idea is cartoonish in its essence but the pic is shot and played with such straight-faced realism that Swallow becomes utterly ridiculous.

About so much more than domestic ennui. If youve ever felt unwanted even by yourself, this film is for you.

I had no idea a swallowing fetish was a thing ("verophelia" per Google). If you can stomach watching an entire movie on the subject (no pun intended), Swallow is for you.

This film was kind of an irregular stuff. A mixture that never settles completely. Swallows is a story about trauma. A psychological disorder, feminism, patriarchy and empowerment. Swallow is a suggestive tale and an interesting critique of the social facade in which some women can be trapped and the social interactions that puts them there. Swallows is Haley Bennett's show and she does a splendid job, however the director forgets about the others and frankly the people around her never stop looking like simple cartoons and that baffled me, especially because the film fails to establish the necessary strength to highlight the complexities of its themes. It plays safe for the most part and that was a bit disappointing. However, it's still an intriguing experience, especially since it doesn't provide clear answers and even when a film fails to be notable, it's always respectable that it doesn't try to give you everything so easily. I only would've liked the story to be more crude, because if you're already at the doors of that threshold, then dare to cross it.

(Mauro Lanari) Do they intend to make a movie for every DSM psychopathology? In this case, the director chooses the picacism of an ex-saleswoman who swallows the bitter pills of her previous trauma and her marriage with a husband of superior socio-economic background. The evergreen "This Is the Day" (1983) by "The The" in the soundtrack would have deserved a better fate.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]