Sometimes initial premise will be just weird enough to get viewers in the door regardless of the final product. Swallow the debut feature by Carlo Mirabella-Davis is a case example. Haley Bennett plays a young housewife who one day discover she has an affinity for swallowing household objects. There’s more going from a plot perspective but that one sentence is all the film needs to sell itself. Unfortunately, it’s exactly the sort of indie drama/ psychological thriller that despite the initial strangeness of the premise is going to take the most conventional arthouse route possible. Bennett is terrific in the central role and Mirabella-Davis proves a supreme talent with Incredibly confident, very visually striking direction. The film clearly has pretensions of of psychoanalysing Bennetts characters tendency as well as extending beyond the typical playbook for this type of narrative. The story direction becomes incredibly obvious past a certain point and you have a film but could have really taken advantage of its premise but is stuck in the dead zone occupied buy a lot of middling indie fare. Far too weird for a mainstream audience and yet nowhere near deep enough to be taken to heart by the film analysis crowd.
5/10
A Little Bit Of Everything 