Avis des critiques

The quiet astonishment of Swallow comes from the fact that it actually turns out not to be about a breakdown but a breakthrough. It’d be wrong to say that Hunter’s pica saves her, but it does force her to awaken from the numb passivity with which she’s been drifting through life, grounding her more and more in her own fallible, fecund flesh.

While it's thematically disturbing, "Swallow" is rarely too hard to watch. In fact, the film's stunning cinematography by Katelin Arizmendi... creates a serene and vibrant environment that is almost impossible to look away from.

In the tradition of Todd Haynes’s “Safe,” with a dash of horror films like “The Stepford Wives” and “The Perfection” thrown in for chilly measure, “Swallow” is the hushed, methodical chronicle of a woman’s descent into ever more self-harming extremes, a journey that, in this case, has its roots in patriarchy at its most controlling and violent.

Unlike many pregnancy-themed horror movies, “Swallow,” quite radically, doesn't linger on the monstrosity of the body and transformations that come with it. 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.

Bennett is exceptional, with an eerie, glazed-over expression that seems impenetrable.

Writer-director Carlo Mirabella-Davis has made a feminist film that lodges deep in your throat, taking up residence in your chest as you struggle to breathe... “Swallow” is difficult viewing at times, but it’s psychologically rich and always feels genuine, even in its gorgeously stylized approach to the interior life of its complex protagonist.

The horror genre is ripe for exploring the intricacies of the #MeToo experience in a very visceral way... But when the theme is shoehorned into a narrative seemingly only in an effort to comply with the cultural dialogue, it becomes an uncomfortable and awkward viewing experience. That’s what happens throughout writer-director Carlo Mirabella-Davis’ “Swallow.”

The narrative contains multitudes of subtexts, and Bennett superbly modulates between learned impassivity and outright despair, capturing the pain of a kind of actress who has come to feel trapped in her role.

It heads, with logic and conviction, to an endpoint that is, in its way, more provocative and controversial than anything to be found in your average genre flick, and which forms an unusual echoic response to the motifs in the film’s opening.

Remarkably, in spite of its exploration of isolation, mental illness, and bodily harm, Swallow is a dedicatedly funny movie. Grounded in Hunter’s perspective, the world around her seems inherently absurd, with characters cartoonish in their righteous privilege... And all of this keenly enhances the horror that creeps at the story’s core.

"Swallow" posits the exotic eating disorder Pica... as a radical feminist metaphor. It does so with elegant restraint, all the better to contrast with the horrifying visual of someone swallowing a thumb tack.

A bold and unconventional thriller made real by the evolution of lead actress Haley Bennett from porcelain housewife to jagged-edged reactionary, this striking debut... ignores the medical side of the eating disorder in favor of a far more radical psychological reading.