Swallowed Review: An Aggressively Uncomfortable Horror-Thriller

Some films can get a lot of mileage from a simple premise, especially the kind of nightmare scenarios that fuel thrillers and horror films. Green Room was as minimalist as it gets — a rock band sees something they shouldn’t at a dive bar that’s run by neo-Nazis, and barricade themselves in the green room. It’s a great little premise (just like Rope, Buried, and other claustrophobic thrillers before it), requiring only a handful of actors and a small budget.

Swallowed is in that camp, but with an emphasis on ‘camp’ itself. The horror-thriller has a twisted, brilliantly simple idea — two friends become ‘body packers’ by swallowing condoms full of drugs and smuggling them across the border, and things go horribly wrong. Before one is able to fully defecate the drugs, he is punched in the gut, causing the condom to break and the contents to escape. Normally, this would be a death sentence as the heroin or whatever other condom-ensconced drug floods the system. In Swallowed, the drugs aren’t just powders or rocks; they’re alive.

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Two Good Friends Swallow Bad Drugs

That’s a pretty enticing hook, and Swallowed carries it through to its extreme. It takes its time getting there, though, preferring to instead patiently establish its two main characters. In the film, two best friends are partying before one of them leaves their podunk border town to become a porn star in Los Angeles. This is Ben, who begins the film with a sultry dance and lots of smiles. As played by Cooper Koch, Ben is infinitely charming, likable, and warm. He wants one fun last night in town.

His friend Dom (a mysterious Jose Colon) clearly loves him, but in a way that transcends identity. He doesn’t return the more public displays of affection that Ben exudes, but he does tell Ben that he always loved him more than all his girlfriends, even if he is ‘straight.’ He even admires the way Ben has sex, and roots for his success in the porn industry the way girlfriends would push each other to follow their dreams as musicians. It’s both a platonic relationship and a uniquely loving one. Dom would probably die for Ben, and in his attempt to accrue a bunch of cash for Ben’s trip on their last night together, he risks just that.

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Dom made a deal with the devil, or at least Jena Malone, who is phenomenally cutting as Alice, a rude, forceful, sarcastic drug dealer who is unlikable as she is coldly competent and efficient. The Donnie Darko and Consecration actress is great as someone who wants to get the show on the road, forcing the boys to swallow the condoms of drugs after initial trepidations. They’re supposed to meet her at a rest stop across the border, but it’s there that everything goes horribly wrong.

Swallowed Is Uncomfortable and Worth It

Momentum Pictures

A stereotypical redneck character enters the public bathroom where Dom is attempting to purge the condoms he swallowed (the character is a thin caricature, but he does represent the kind of unbridled homophobic hostility so many queer people fear). An altercation ensues, and Dom is punched in the gut. As Alice later explains, these condoms aren’t filled with typical drugs, but actually living creatures, disgusting little insects whose bites get you high and horny (comparable to licking a Sonoran Desert toad).

With Dom’s guts in a rut, he and Ben are led by Alice to a cabin in the woods where they attempt to extract the remaining condoms from Dom without tearing them open. It’s delicate, tense, and awkward. There was a classic French film, The Wages of Fear, where desperate men drove trucks filled with nitroglycerin through the jungle to earn good money, but of course, the chemical would explode and kill them if excessively perturbed. Swallowed is like The Wages of Fear in that sense, if the nitroglycerin were condoms, and the South American jungle was Dom’s colon. Call it The Wages of Queer, perhaps, as the film is incredibly intelligent about the dangerous cost of that identity.

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Yes, Swallowed doesn’t shy away from the very uncomfortable, intensely vulnerable act of fishing out drug condoms from inside a man’s anus, but to its credit, it manages to make this suspenseful and visceral rather than some gag from Scary Movie. Things get worse when Alice’s boss, played to psychotic perfection by Mark Patton, shows up at the cabin demanding his drugs. Waving a gun around in his faux-cowboy jacket and spiked, dyed hair, Patton is simultaneously hilarious and intimidating as hell, playing an old queen with deep-seated issues who thinks he’s the good guy.

A Distinctly Queer Suspense Story

Momentum Pictures

As one can imagine, Swallowed is a wild ride after its initial 20 minutes, which gingerly orchestrates a sweet dynamic between two close friends. The opening of the film also stages its horrific events as almost a test of sorts (or a prophetic warning) for Ben, readying him for the scary world of L.A. and the adult film industry, where he will likely have his hand in someone else’s colon, and not for bug-filled condoms.

In this and many other ways, Swallowed does feel very closely tied to the LGBTQ+ experience of young people, expressing their fears and the ways in which many queer people are forced to be unfairly resilient and tough to survive in society. The final half hour of the film is an extremely unique, psychologically chilling standoff between Ben and the queer drug dealer, and feels weighted with much more meaning for LGBTQ+ audiences than the film directly suggests.

While that ending may have some questionable moments that require one’s suspension of disbelief, it is one hell of a finale, almost reminiscent of Tarantino’s tense and lengthy two-person scenes in Inglourious Basterds and Pulp Fiction. The road viewers must take to get there, though, is extremely uncomfortable, involving greased-up hands, full-frontal nudity, scatological discomfort, and nasty drug bugs. It’s intense and often disgusting, but it’s bold, transgressive, and queer in a way few films could ever muster.

Produced by All the Dead Boys, in association with Leroi and Witchcraft Motion Picture Company, Momentum Pictures is releasing Swallowed on digital and on demand on February 14, 2023.

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