The movie's contrasting color schemes, the pinkish womb-like glow, with the colder antiseptic tones of the oppressive outside world, allow us to relate to the experience of embodying Hunter's flesh, while also, often, feeling like a foreign invader.Īs Hunter, Haley Bennett evokes a softer Betty Draper and, from the opening, her sweet apple-cheeked demeanor is never marked with expected signals of hysteria or unraveling. Along with the striking sound, the film's visuals draw hard lines between the tense and rigid shapes of the modernist locations, with the soft, fragile lines of Hunter's face and body. With crisp sound design, sure to trigger a mysophobia response, “Swallow” draws us into Hunter's bodily experience. Only Jonathan Glazer's “ Under the Skin” does a better job of evoking the particular pull of being an outsider in your own body. Hunter’s journey will take her on a path towards connecting the mind and body, even only briefly. “Swallow” is an uncompromising horror that evokes deeply rooted alienation and dysmorphia. It is a film that inverses the typical trajectory by having a character begin in a state of subjugation, who slowly fights for ownership and freedom over her body and life. Unlike many pregnancy-themed horror movies, “Swallow,” quite radically, doesn't linger on the monstrosity of the body and transformations that come with it. While she's worked hard to keep it together, unaware that she's been worn down and bent to fit the needs and desires of others, she reaches a breaking point. How, from a young age, her boundaries have been eroded. What little power she had is also stripped down, and her every movement is tracked and annotated.Īs the film's different threads come together, we come to understand how Hunter has never had authority over her own body. With her Hunter's already powerless role in the household further diminished, she becomes an incubator for the family legacy. The fleeting feeling of autonomy she has over her body soon gives over to her husband and his family. She can't keep her secret for long, though, especially as she soon discovers she's pregnant. As Hunter's swallowing habit grows, represented by an ever-growing display of little objects on her mantelpiece, so does her sense of power.
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