It’s easy to mistake Hunter Conrad (Haley Bennett), the woman at the center of “Swallow,” for a mid-20th-century housewife: She dotes on her husband while wearing pearls and cocktail dresses and has a Jackie Kennedy bounce to her bob. The one deviation is playing iPhone games to relieve her ennui.
Viewers will anxiously wait for the “happy” wife to crack in this feature from the writer-director Carlo Mirabella-Davis. When Hunter’s not isolated in her secluded house, she’s surrounded by suffocating stereotypes: the wealthy husband (appropriately named Richie) who doesn’t really listen; the uncaring father-in-law and the mother-in-law whose generosity carries spiky undertones of accusation that Hunter is a gold digger. (There are also hackneyed horror visuals of animal slaughter.)
Then Hunter learns she’s pregnant. Bennett is exceptional, with an eerie, glazed-over expression that seems impenetrable; she flashes her husband a Stepford smile, disguising her true reaction. The pregnancy triggers pica, a compulsion to consume nonfood items. She first swallows a marble, then escalates to more dangerous objects — a thumbtack, a chess piece, a battery — all potentially fatal to her and the baby.
Mirabella-Davis, whose crew was largely made up of women, avoids pure body-horror sensationalism as he traces Hunter’s need for control to a trauma in her past. But 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.
Swallow
Rated R for consumption of sharp objects. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
