On demand: "Swallow"

A carefully composed fable on the grisly business of consumption, Carlo Mirabella-Davis's Swallow casts Haley Bennett as Hunter, a young bride living what in theory appears the American dream: hunky, moneyed husband (Austin Stowell), modernist clifftop villa, hours and hours of leisure time, and a first child on the way. Yet the gnawing emptiness of this lifestyle eventually leads her to chow down on something other than the lamb-and-Cabernet combo the couple serve at their dinner parties, a deviation that begins with crunching ice cubes on a night out during which she's once more overlooked, and rapidly accelerates from there. Marbles, drawing pins, pages from a self-help book, batteries, safety pins, huge gulping handfuls of garden soil: it's quite the alternative menu, what even Heston Blumenthal would consider beyond the pale, setting us to wondering just how far our gal is prepared to go to fill this void, and when it's all going to come out, both figuratively and literally.

A scattering of Gallic names among the credits and the red-white-and-blue colour scheme Hunter picks out for the nursery only reinforce an idea this is the semi-respectable American mutation of that very French strain of body horror that began with Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day and Marina de Van's In My Skin and progressed through Julia Ducorneau's Raw to arrive at Coralie Fargeat's recent, much-laurelled The Substance. Mirabella-Davis stakes out the kind of chichi locations more commonly found in Pedro Almodóvar or Todd Haynes productions (cushioned parlours, fancy restaurants), then hones in on the aberrant behaviour that undercuts any notion of comfortable luxury; it's the swallowing, yes, but it's also the shitting that results in bloodstains on the thousand-dollar negligees. The psychology informing Hunter's condition gets left as an intriguingly open question, even as the protagonist submits to therapy. Is this flagrant self-sabotage? Or just something to do, an attempt to reintroduce some tension to an otherwise inert and frictionless existence?

The plot develops in interesting, messy ways. A Syrian nurse (played by Laith Nakli, Ramy's Uncle Naseem) points out that Hunter likely wouldn't have time to incur these first-world problems were she being shot at in a warzone; these unruly appetites assume a new shape with the introduction of the kind of character only Denis O'Hare, the actor's actor, could imagine playing with this level of commitment. It all has something to do with control, and more specifically control over a woman's body - it's recognisably a byproduct of the first Trump administration - and proves all the more impressive for landing at the quietly serious end of the spectrum. Mirabella-Davis rejects the shock tactics and overt sensationalism common in this subgenre, instead rooting everything in tangled character, and thereby arriving at a subtly disconcerting vision of an America in which everybody is stricken by compulsion of some sort. No-one is taking it more seriously than Bennett, who's presumably lost a lot of roles to Jennifer Lawrence over the past decade, but here lands one for the showreel: a next-gen Stepford Wife, allowing the actress to play longing, wilful perversity, pronounced gastrointestinal distress, and a mounting desire to get herself back in order, to settle this stomach once and for all. I couldn't recommend watching at mealtime - not unless eating through close-up footage of endoscopic procedures is your bag - but it might be an idea to keep snacks, of the conventional, high-fibre kind, close at hand.

Swallow is available to rent via Prime Video and YouTube.