Swallow (Carlo Mirabella-Davis)

[Grouchy]

[Peng]

Might be off-topic, but shouldn't this be 2020 release? Looking on imdb and it played in 2019 wholly only in festival circuits.

[Grouchy]

I've always been of the opinion that a festival premiere is the actual release of the movie so I go by IMDb dates. No big deal, though - if Matchcut's criteria is different please have it moved to the 2020 sub-forum.

Anyway, this is a powerful mood piece that bears the strong visual influence of Hitchcock's psychological films like Marnie. Haley Bennett is a revelation as Hunter, a girl who can't stop swallowing wildly inappropriate stuff. Swallow is deeply disturbing at a level I wasn't ready for - I'm not a psychologist so take this (dubious) opinion with a grain of a salt, but even though it was a little too neat how we get to discover the source of her disorder, it's damn effective drama. This is the kind of opera prima that leaves one ready for whatever else the director can do with his/her talent.

[Stay Puft]

I watched this right after Beanpole and have some similar problems with it, i.e. I'm totally down for what this is doing thematically but the execution leaves so much to be desired. Both films even do something similar with a protagonist suffering from a mental illness which manifests in these dramatic episodes accompanied by idiotic sound or music cues. No thank you. They also boast a somewhat rigorous but ultimately simplistic aesthetic; both films are pretty hamfisted in their use of color, for example (the husband bathed in red light while shouting "I will fucking hunt you down" LMAOOOOOOO), and the austere symmetry and extreme close-ups employed here do have thematic relevance but the images are ultimately trite and superficial (and typical of amateur indie filmmaking). Normally, I'd just outright hate any film that exploits mental illness for a blunt metaphor (and the way this film literalizes its metaphors, can we even call them metaphors?), but I felt the film actually had its heart in the right place here; it stumbled by conflating that illness with other story threads (e.g. rape) and not really having a clear goal outside of the articulation of its central metaphor. As such, her mental illness is still subsumed by that metaphor; this is just a clumsy script, clumsily executed.