With a stress on queer horror - Smith previously directed Into the Dark’s gay slasher Midnight Kiss - Swallowed emphasizes modern fears to accentuate its darkest moments. A payday awaits the duo should they cross the Maine/Canada border with products undamaged and properly cleaned, but nothing is ever that easy. Enter Alice (Jena Malone), the forceful drug trafficker who forces Dom then Benjamin to ingest baggies of some narcotic. Jose Colon and Cooper Koch play their parts as flirty and adoring friends who’ve never crossed the barrier into relationship territory - Dom just wants to give Benjamin a going away present. Swallowed follows Dom (Jose Colon) and Benjamin (Cooper Koch) on Benjamin’s last hurrah before becoming a gay porn star in Los Angeles. There’s nothing overly complicated since Smith uses chemistry and biology to remind us of our bodily fragility, both clever and limiting for audiences. Swallowed incorporates digestive horrors like in Angus Sampson and Tony Mahony’s drug-running thriller The Mule or Carlo Mirabella-Davis’s Swallow - very uncomfortable, very recognizable gastro gross-outs. What Smith reminds us is our bodies can be subject to horrors far more ordinary, which are subjectable scenarios some even choose. When movies like Carter Smith’s Swallowed tease “body horror,” first instincts often assume something Cronenbergian or mutated like Brian Yuzna’s Society.
