Disordered eating, and aberrant behavior in general, often stems from a craving for control, and in Swallow it doesn’t take long to see why Hunter (Haley Bennett), a young, newly pregnant housewife, could use some agency over her own life. As she conveys to her new mother-in-law (Elizabeth Marvel), she was just some girl who worked in retail until her wealthy husband, Richie (Austin Stowell), waltzed in one day and lifted her into a life of luxury, something he won’t let her forget. Cringingly obsequious as she is toward her pompous, impatient husband and her condescending in-laws, who treat her like a peasant who won the lottery, Hunter’s existence is a hollow one until she finds something to fill it with—namely, an array of variously shaped, inedible objects.
Though Hunter quite literally lives in a glass house, she’s more likely to gulp down stones than throw them. Starting innocuously enough with a marble, Hunter consumes these items as part of her own secret life, excitedly donning rubber gloves and rifling through her resulting stool to retrieve the objects that have passed all the way through her so she can clean them off and line them up in a sort of makeshift shrine.
As she progresses to sharper and more obstructive objects, the subsequent pain and unpredictability of internal damage seems to become part of the thrill, a stark contrast to an otherwise antiseptic life where she’s treated as little more than a pretty incubator. In fact, as Hunter’s increasingly daring gustatory exploits lead her to more dangerous objects and inevitable medical intervention that offers the diagnosis of the mental disorder pica, Richie’s primary concern is the damage she could cause to his future child. That is, when he’s not berating her and accusing her of essentially pulling a fast one on him by not offering a prenuptial forewarning that she could potentially develop a psychiatric condition at some point.
As Hunter’s peculiar predilection is revealed to her new family, Swallow becomes an unsubtle but nevertheless compelling allegory for the policing of women’s bodies by rich, powerful men. Richie hires a goon (Laith Nakli) to surveil Hunter’s every move (and morsel) under the guise that the intimidating man is really just a personal assistant who can help her around the house. But each effort to curb her unusual ingestion only pushes her further into exercising a warped sense of control via indulgence in her insatiable compulsions.
For his debut feature, writer-director Carlo Mirabella-Davis has drawn inspiration from his grandmother, who responded to a restrictive, loveless marriage through the manifestation of extreme obsessive-compulsive tendencies. And yet, for a film so integrally focused on a woman’s control over the choices she makes about her own body, the story can’t fully escape its lensing through a male gaze. In a sense, this is in keeping with its at-times Hitchcockian aesthetic and harsh treatment of its blonde, female protagonist. But Swallow succeeds in large part due to a dedicated and captivating performance from Bennett in the lead role, and in Mirabella-Davis’ effective juxtaposition of contrasts, skewering society’s ugly insistence on both putting women on a pedestal and subjugating them, encapsulated here by the striking image of a trophy wife eating dirt.
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