Editorials
Battling for Control in the Face of Trauma in ‘Swallow’
Being a people-pleaser is exhausting. You are constantly worried about how someone is thinking or feeling; you try to do everything in your power to make sure they are happy, and you absolutely panic at the thought of someone being upset. It doesn’t matter what they are upset about; if they are upset, it feels like a failure. People-pleasing is often an effect of trauma, as you have been programmed to expect that you are the cause of someone’s unhappiness. No matter who you are talking to or who is in your life, this trauma follows you in every interaction. This is the life of Hunter in Carlo Mirabella-Davis’ Swallow.
In Swallow, Haley Bennet plays Hunter, a housewife who has married into an extremely wealthy family. With that wealth comes a certain set of expectations and standards, ranging from the length of her hair to the way she dresses to how she gets mental health services. She is a beautiful blonde puppet who is constantly reminded that without him and his money, she is nothing. She has no talents, she has no wealth, so she must comply with any and all orders or risk being turned onto the streets.
So, Hunter reads self-help books and does whatever she can to find solace in her new life. One of those coping mechanisms is swallowing items like marbles, thumbtacks, and batteries. The act of swallowing these objects is something that she is doing for herself; no one else is telling her to do it. It is a little treat, or so she thinks, something she can do without her husband, Richie (Austin Stowell), knowing or policing. This small act is one of rebellion, a grasp at control that is constantly slipping from her fingertips.
However, the illusion of control begins to vanish as she discovers she is pregnant. Of course, her pregnancy is celebrated by her husband as he exclaims “we are pregnant” and sees this as another thing he can make about himself, as well as his family. But, as seen in films like Rosemary’s Baby, pregnancy is often used as an exploitation of the female body. Women become a vessel for a man’s child, and hopefully heir. She is just a body to carry the precious cargo, something that is only protected and cared for out of necessity until the baby is born. In Rosemary’s Baby, the baby was the literal son of Satan. In Swallow, the baby is more symbolically the spawn of an evil family, but it still represents the hold his family has on Hunter’s life.
When Richie discovers Hunter’s appetite for the inedible, drastic measures must be taken. His child must be protected and he will do anything to ensure their safety. Don’t be mistaken, any help given to Hunter is only given to help the baby. She is medicated, given a caretaker—against her will— and reluctantly taken to therapy. To him, therapy is out of his control and a place where he can not dictate her every thought. It is a place for her to freely express herself and that terrifies him.
Yet through therapy, something much deeper and traumatic is revealed: Hunter was conceived when her mother was raped. She cheerily explains the story to her therapist, going into detail about who her father is, how he raped her mother, and how long he was in prison. While explaining this, she also continues to minimalize the effect such information has had on her life. Yet Hunter has offered an explanation for her actions and can be further understood; this was not just some event that happened and didn’t shape who she was. Her entire existence was marked by a single horrific act of violence, and she wants to avoid that fact as much as possible.
While her mother is not shown in the film, Hunter tries to quickly explain just how happy she was with her mother, stepdad, and new sisters. But through that sparkling veneer of a perfect family, Hunter slowly reveals how isolated she was from her family. Growing up, Hunter wanted nothing more than her mother to love her regardless of how she was conceived. She has spent her life trying to make people happy and make them love her despite everything else. She is a chronic people-pleaser due to her own neglect as a child, and that is reflected in her romantic relationships
But as Hunter peels back the layers of her trauma, she begins to recognize the cycles of abuse she has been stuck in her entire life. For so long she has focused on making others happy instead of herself. Swallowing was the one thing that made her happy. Now she seeks more than a clandestine marble; she seeks liberation.
Liberation for Hunter comes in the form of an abortion, done with the symbolic swallowing of a pill. Hunter has swallowed objects to exercise control, and this final swallowing scene is the ultimate act of bodily autonomy and rebellion. Abortion, in Swallow, is ultimately an empowering act, one that has freed Hunter. Her abortion also frees her from the cycle of abuse perpetuated by her own mother. While Hunter was conceived in rape, and her child was conceived presumably consensually, the child still represents a life where she cannot ever be herself. She is a child that represents guilt and regret, and she does not want another child to experience a life of resentment. Further, the baby, if they had been born, would have been a bargaining chip, a piece of capital used by her husband to dictate her actions. Hunter takes control over her own narrative through abortion, doing what her mother didn’t.
While this is not a film centered on the politics of abortion, it does show abortion as empowering and a way to exercise control over one’s body. Abortion is Hunter’s ultimate act of control, of removing herself from abuse. It marks her beginning to move towards a life where she does what makes her happy. Swallow is Hunter’s painful journey towards that realization, as well as a rumination on how difficult coming to such a realization can be. The female body is so often a battleground, and Hunter found a way to win her war.
Swallow is now available on VOD.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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