By Robert Martin
You’ve gotta love Jena Malone. Hers is a career that’s included huge franchises like The Hunger Games, working with the likes of Paul Thomas Anderson and Zack Snyder, and a brilliant turn in The Neon Demon. However, she’s also no stranger to more edgy, independent work and in much of that, she’s shown she isn’t afraid to take a risk. In those terms, Swallowed might just be her riskiest and most fucked-up film yet.
Reunited with writer-director Carter Smith, who made The Ruins with her back in 2006, Malone plays a drug runner who recruits two friends on their last night together before one of them goes to the big city to star in gay porn. Things soon go badly wrong, however, because the drugs they must swallow to get over the border aren’t what they seem… they’re alive.
Picture if Lucy were crossed with Deliverance and directed by indie queer filmmaker Greg Araki – Swallowed is shocking in ways you won’t expect. That’s because it isn’t the horror elements that make it so unsettling, but the queer ones. The sexuality on display is refreshingly normalised, and it’s great to see a camp, old evil queen as the sadistic villain, though all of the performances are wonderfully convincing.
Swallowed will make you squirm, not because of what’s been swallowed – but because what goes in must come out. How that’s achieved is something surely only a queer filmmaker could have come up with. Swallowed may not be an overt horror film, but it certainly has some horrific stuff going on.
Swallowed is out now on digital in the US and Blue Finch Film Releasing will release the film on digital download in the UK on April 24th.
