Short Takes: ‘Swallowed’ (2022) ★★★

Not to be confused with Swallow [NSFW].

A body horror movie written and directed by the same man who gave us Jamie Marks is Dead and The Passenger, with full frontal male nudity and featuring the star of Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge as a vicious queen? You don’t have to ask me twice.

Making Carter Smith’s Swallowed even more intriguing—for me, at least—is Smith makes his story decidedly queer. When we first meet one of its protagonists, Benjamin (Cooper Koch, recently in Netflix’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menedez Story), he’s celebrating his impending escape from his dead-end hometown in rural Canada, his joining an L.A. gay porn studio’s stable being his all-expense-paid ticket to a more exciting life. His best friend Dom (Jose Colon) thinks Ben is naïve (“Those guys are going to want all that money back, man”), but celebrates with him, nevertheless. Dom is supposedly straight, yet it’s obvious he’s not that straight. Just as obvious is Ben very much hoping tonight’s the night they take their friendship up a notch, or at the very least, Dom consents to a farewell BJ. Alas, despite pointing our minds in that direction, the movie’s title is not an oral sex reference.

On the drive home Dom takes a detour to check on his cousin, DiDi. He and Didi had worked out a deal to smuggle some drugs into the U.S, the money from which Dom was going to give to Ben as a going away present (dude, you could’ve just agreed to let Ben blow you). Except, Didi is now too stoned to act as the go-between, so Dom now must deal with her girlfriend Alice (Jena Malone), who is neither congenial nor compromising, pulling a gun when Dom balks at having to swallow condoms stuffed with product. That gun also comes in handy when Ben needs to be convinced to swallow some condoms as well.

Crossing the border into Maine is the easy part, it turns out. Complications arise when Dom attempts shitting out the contraband and discovers it’s not a drug—but its bite can induce a high. By the time Alice arrives to retrieve the product, she finds Dom catatonic and pants-less and Ben freaking the fuck out. Her boss Rich (Mark Patton) isn’t going to like this.

Though Swallowed is labeled a body horror, don’t go in expecting Cronenberg (David or Brandon) wrapped in a rainbow flag. It feels more like a homoerotic crime thriller, with the tension derived from the unpredictable situation Ben and Dom find themselves in, without any grotesque physical transformations (you can expect some blood and shit, however, as well as one prosthetic dick* that’s almost convincing). Smith has shown in his other films that he can get a lot from a limited budget, and he gets more than his money’s worth with Koch, Colon, Malone and Patton, all great in their roles. Unfortunately, Smith tacked on a silly epilogue that’s tonally at odds with everything that came before it and dismisses all Ben has gone through. It doesn’t ruin the movie, but it did leave a sour taste in my mouth.

*Not counted as the movie’s full-frontal male nudity.