Swallowed

Much can be derived from a simple premise, such as the nightmarish scenarios that drive some movies, especially thrillers and horror films. The Green Room was minimalist to the extreme. One rock band barricaded itself in the Green Room after seeing a neo-Nazi run What Not to See in his bar. It's a very small premise, requiring only a handful of actors and a small budget (like Rope, Buried, and the other claustrophobic thrillers before them).

Swallowed is in that camp, but it's more focused on "camp" itself. The horror thriller has a twisted, brilliantly simple idea. You become a "bodypacker" by smuggling across the border and things are going well... horribly wrong. Before the drug can be completely expelled, the intestine is punched, and the condom bursts open, spilling its contents. Usually, this is a death sentence as heroin and other drugs embedded in condoms flood your system. At Swallowed, drugs are more than just dust and stones. you live

Two of good friends are on bad drugs

It's a very engaging hook, and Swallowed takes it to the extreme. However, it takes time to get there, and instead prefers to patiently establish the two main characters. In the film, two best friends leave the border town of Podunk to become a porn star in Los Angeles before they throw a party. This is Ben who starts the movie with a sensual dance and lots of smiles. Played by Cooper Koch, Ben is endlessly charming, affable and warm-hearted. He wants to have fun in town last night.

His friend Dom (the mysterious José Colon) clearly loves him, but it's more than an identity. He doesn't reciprocate the more public displays of affection that Ben exudes, but tells Ben that even though he's "straight," he's always loved him more than any of his girlfriends. He admires Ben's sex methods and attributes his success in the porn industry to his girlfriends pushing each other to pursue his dreams as a musician. increase. It's both platonic and a unique loving relationship. is endangering

Swallowing is unpleasant and worth it

A typical redneck character walks into a public restroom, where Dom is about to remove a swallowed condom (the character is a thin caricature, but he is the unbridled homophobe that so many queer people fear). ). An argument ensues and Dom is punched in the stomach. As Alice later explains, these condoms aren't typical drug-filled, but real creatures that make you feel uplifted and horny when you chew on them (like licking a toad in the Sonoran Desert). something like).

With Dom's guts, he and Ben are led by Alice to a cabin in the woods where they attempt to snatch the remaining condoms from Dom without breaking them. It's gentle, it's tense, it's awkward. There was the classic French film, The Wages of Fear. In this movie, desperate men make a fortune driving a truck full of nitroglycerin through the jungle. If it was a nitroglycerin condom, and the South American jungle was Dom's colon, then what was swallowed is sort of a reward for fear in that sense. The film speaks so incredibly intelligently about the perilous cost of that identity that perhaps we call it the queer wage. 

A Distinctly Queer Suspense Story

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. But the road for viewers to get there is quite jarring: greasy hands, frontal nudity, scat complaints, and nasty drug worms. And it's queer in a way few films have ever come together.