An experience that’s both lurid and cathartic, Swallow is not the movie you think it’s going to be and yet its unpredictable journey is one that’s well worth taking. Focused on sedate young housewife Hunter’s relationship with her family, old and new, and her newfound habit for swallowing non-food objects (a psychological disorder called ‘pica’ that gives people an appetite for normally ”inedible” things like cat hair or pins and needles), Swallow is a delicately-told, well-acted, and often-cringe-inducing tale of identity and reclamation at death-defying costs.

Haley Bennett plays Hunter with the withdrawn curiosity of a reclusive people-pleaser, stored away in a perfectly manicured glass house tucked along the Hudson River. Painstakingly doting wife to the successful-by-nepotism business-man-child Richie (Austin Stowell, perfectly repugnant in the role), Hunter is a flesh and blood femme-bot that powers on when her hubby waltzes through the door and sits around whittling away the hours on her cell phone when he is not there. Her life is cavernous and hollow. It reeks of tragedy.

When a pregnancy test registers positive, Hunter, taking the advice of her conceited mother-in-law Katherine (Elizabeth Marvel, aptly detestable here), decides to take a modicum of control by “doing something that surprises her” once a day. To the eventual chagrin of those around her, that surprise is gorging on things like buttons, push-pins, garden rocks, and batteries. As her pregnancy advances and her condition worsens, Hunter is hospitalized with a belly full of rather-concerning, not-so-yummy stuff.

Swallow feels like the result of writer-director Carlo Mirabella-Davis watching one too many episodes of TLC’s “My Strange Addiction” and deciding to use the lurid backdrop of pica to paint an enigmatic and empathic tragedy of trauma and control. On the one hand, the scenes of Hunter forcibly gulping down various metals and stabby things are chilling and cringetastic but they mask a deeper hurt: the character’s complete and total lack of agency and control. She has, in turn, become a mask herself, embodying the “fake it till you make it” methodology to happiness, terrified of who she might really be. And this is the direction that the story ultimates leads, towards Hunter’s deeply personal reckoning with herself and her history. To discover what drives her to not only swallow a bunch of shit, but also why she’s willing to endure all the metaphorical shit that her new family gives her and all the shit her old family fed her: this is what becomes truly engulfing about Swallow.

As Mirabella-Davis winds us back through Hunter’s guarded psychological state, he unearths the fragility of a woman suffering an identity crisis. Ideas of legacy, empowerment, and self-destruction are explored through a Hitchcockian lens, with the lingering sense of unease that Mirabella-Davis conjures populating every square inch of the frame and the character’s psychology. There’s a palpable dread that Mirabella-Davis injects onto the screen from the vacuous and artificial perfection of the production design to the subtle and provocative score from Nathan Halpern, all of which seep into the trance-like state of Hunter and our viewing of her. His use of lighting is particularly striking, a pale of near-hallucinogenic reds entombing Hunter in a predatory manner. There’s rarely a minute you want to take your eyes off the screen, the enduring sense that things could go terribly wrong at any minute keeping this viewer’s attention on lockdown throughout.

Lead by a restrained but powerful performance by Bennett, Swallow effectively uses genre tropes to deliver what is mostly a through-and-through drama. Be prepared though, as many will likely find themselves uncomfortably squirming through the most gruesome instances of Hunter chugging small household items like they’re a bag of tortilla chips. There’s occasional flashes of crimson byproduct as said objects are exiting Hunter’s body but Mirabella-Davis leaves most of the damage implied, the unhealed psychological scar tissue much deeper and more permanent than any of Hunter’s self-inflicted wounds.

CONCLUSION: ‘Swallow’ is a subdued thriller/character study lead by a breakout performance from Haley Bennett that thoughtfully explores the concept of lingering trauma and self-destructive habits. The lead character eats lots of metal, so trigger warning for those who find that particularly disturbing.