“Everything’s so blurry and everyone’s so fake
And everybody’s empty and everything is so messed up
Preoccupied without you, I cannot live at all
My whole world surrounds you, I stumble then I crawl“
Puddle of Mudd, “Blurry”
Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer’s The Swallow (not to be confused with Swallow) opens with an absolute banger of a gore scene that – well-crafted but ultimately only hints at being important – should probably set the tone for the rest of the movie. A woman, played by the versatile and talented Brittany Allen, has to talk her partner through the process of amputating her arm in a tent. It takes a couple of tries, but things only get weirder and grosser from there.
There might be a bit of a quiet movement happening in horror right now against any project that could be described as “elevated.” For me, a writer and sometimes critic of the genre that enjoys and appreciates the capacity to find unnecessary subtext in a ghost popping out of a closet or a dude in a mask popping out of a swamp to slay some teenagers, this is not a welcome development. But I don’t want to come off as, ahem, a stick in the mud and can’t deny that schlocky, silly horror still very much has a place both in my heart and at the theatre. And I similarly can’t deny that some of my most favourite movie moments at home and at the multiplex have been from movies that are objectively silly.
The Swallow slaps the old ‘teens in the woods’ template together with some highly-intelligent and bloodthirsty mud. That’s about all this movie is, and if you walk in expecting some larger story or compelling characters, which I did from the creators of the wonderful Starry Eyes (2014), you’re likely to be disappointed. But as a creature feature with some genuinely terrific effects, it hits the spot. Obnoxious bro Rich (Jack Wright), his mopey stoner friend Vince (Kalama Epstein), his girlfriend Katie (Tayler Buck), her screen-addicted sister Kim (Kayla DiVenere), and hungover diva Ziggy (Grace Van Dien) are headed out to the woods to camp in a secluded spot that Rich used to visit as a child. An interminable mile-long hike to the campsite reveals most of the information we’re going to get from these characters, like Ziggy wearing heels for this adventure for some reason and the appearance of a chain-link fence with barbed wire blocking their path. They find a way through a hole already cut in said fence, but not before clocking some burn marks around it. Before long, the campers discover pools of bubbling goop around the forest, and each are slowly drawn into them to be devoured.
The effects are truly excellent, some completely stomach-turning, but there’s a “subtext is for cowards” feel to it where it’s all very surface-level and which feel tertiary to the goop. For a movie about thick, aggressive mud, it reads as a bit thin and shallow when it comes to the characters and the story. About three quarters of the way through the film there’s a bit of a lightbulb moment as we learn that the slime was uncovered when an oil company began digging in the area and mistook the mud for oil, and this is a tease (but only a tease) of a greater message about respecting nature. It also leads to a genuinely fascinating (if slightly unearned) climax and an ending that’s truly scary to look at, if not to think about. I probably could have done without the half-baked message about how we are destroying the natural beauty of our land and the use of “This Land Is Your Land” over a final montage, which feels both unsubtle and confusing given the teens’ disrespect of that same land, but we can’t have it all.
There have been “malevolent slime” stories in horror before, from The Stuff (1985) to The Raft (one of the segments from 1987’s Creepshow 2), to the ur-example of ghoulish gloop, The Blob (1958), and The Swallow has little nods to all of these. It also manages to bring in aspects of the Artax scene from 1984’s The Neverending Story (though I can say with some certainty that there’s no character here that you’ll connect with nearly enough to ruin your childhood like that did), and the thrill of a game of Floor Is Lava. Writer-directors Kölsch and Widmyer’s were directly influenced by JAWS, which led them to develop “a lifelong unease about being in the water” where “[at] every beach, a giant shark might be waiting to sink its razor-sharp teeth into [them]” and “a favorite childhood game of “the floor is lava”” where “the ground could burn [them while] hopping from couch to chair to coffee table.” The filmmakers also state that their film is based on a pretty simple premise: “what if the ground could eat you?”
I think that’s why The Swallow both does and doesn’t work. It’s an incredibly simple idea that is rendered very well but feels like the creators were writing the story as they went along. If it were a segment in an anthology or a standalone short, I’d be pretty impressed. With what we have here I would like a more substantial movie about the mud, which is not only deadly and sentient but also has moments of real ingenuity, like when it baits one of the kids into stepping into the puddle by tantalizingly leaving the car keys – their only hope of escape – seemingly within reach. Give me a whole movie about the mud plotting the demise of the oil extraction workers or something, and I’d be pretty happy. But what we have here is more of a proof of concept that only hints at something deeper. It’s a plot that’s blurry and muddy and not much more than that. But for a non-elevated piece of modern schlock, maybe that’s enough.
