Horror movies, as we well know, are about what scares us: the man with the axe, the swarm of bugs, the creature that changes shape at will. But more than just monsters, boogeymen, and whatever else goes bump in the night, horror’s great fears reveal much deeper anxieties and sociopolitical attitudes. The slasher craze of the ‘70s and ‘80s evinces a discomfort with the gender binary and its inherent power dynamics. Body horror hinges on the eternal terror that our innards are both unknowable and deeply fallible. Creature features suggest a fear of the “other,” and vampire movies specify it as a fear of contagion, homosexuality, the encroaching East, and more.
In The Swarm, the venue for terror is a family on the brink of collapse, and the terror itself emerges from the places that desperation will push a single mother as she struggles to make ends meet. The single mother is Virginie (Suiane Brahim), a farm dweller who raises locusts as a high-protein food source for humans. She lives in the French countryside with two children, Laura (Marie Narbonne) and Gaston (Raphael Romand), from whom she is slowly sliding into estrangement. In their small community, her strange profession is a source of great embarrassment.
The trouble? Her locusts are dying – they don’t reproduce fast enough to turn a profit or multiply in numbers, and the food Virginie supplies seems unable to sustain them. And so the film’s central conceit and chief source of horror: after an accident knocks Virginie unconscious and cuts open her arm, she discovers that the locusts have taken a liking to human blood.
But as much as it is about the family and the way that traditional modes of life and labor slip into decay under capitalism, The Swarm is also about the modern horror film’s fear of judgment. Like other films of the so-called “prestige horror” trend, it favors a performance of artfulness and composure over the violent, ugly catharsis and strangeness that have always been synonymous with the best of the genre. And it fails precisely because that style – and its implicit fear of being written off as low-brow or schlocky – forces it to reduce a strong concept to a faux-pensive slow burn that never quite catches fire.
Though occasionally a grisly delight, and always admirably lensed by director Just Philippot and cinematographer Romain Carcanade, it often verges on tedium.
The intersection of Virginie’s struggles as a mother and as a businesswoman are the emotional and thematic center of the film. In grieving her husband’s death, it seems she has drifted away from her family and allowed her work to consume her. She spends her days hard at work in the dome-like enclosures that hold her locusts, and her evenings messaging potential buyers online. Her identity as a mother is restricted almost exclusively to the performance of domestic tasks. Certainly, it’s no help that her children resent her work.
Locust growing wasn’t always Virginie’s profession, we learn the family farmed goats together when her husband was still alive. The film never quite specifies, but it seems that her husband died by suicide and that the he was prompted to do so by the financial struggles of being a farmowner in a world where commerce is dominated by big business. Virginie’s locust-farming endeavor, then, offers a stark contrast: here is a woman desperately trying to pry her way out of the past and into the strange present. That her specific means of doing so is a strange health food endeavor seems primed for a larger comment on the modern food industry, but one never quite emerges.
The film’s style, which is indeed similar to the stock style of the prestige horror, favors long takes, deliberate maneuvering of the camera, and mood-setting environmental imagery. Among its most evocative images are those of the family’s isolated farm in the French countryside, the beach where they spend a brief moment of togetherness, and the constructed structures where Virginie tends to her locusts, which intrude prominently on the otherwise rustic locale. That stark contrast, between nature and the strange things forced upon it by human desperation, is the film’s most compelling motif: what becomes of the world when our aspirations disrupt its order?
Philippot’s orderly, regimented style lends itself admirably to capturing these strange intrusions. If there is an image that defines The Swarm, it is hardly of the locusts themselves, but of the otherworldly glow of their greenhouse in the night.
The film’s style also has the effect of eliciting a scrutiny toward its emotional and thematic elements that they are rarely able to withstand. It’s easy to extrapolate the basic ideas inherent to what’s laid out, but harder to imagine what the film thinks it’s doing with them: Virginie’s desperation pushes her deeper into the all-consuming angst of life under late capitalism, and that consumption is literalized with blood-thirsty bugs, but the film passively observes these things more than comments on them. For all its contemplative pacing, emphasis on dialogue, and careful establishment of its characters’ milieu, it amounts to very little.
Horror, of course, never needs to be subtle or nuanced; if ever there’s a genre that can work in broad strokes and bloodbaths, it’s this one. The trouble is that this style of faux-intellectual horror filmmaking shies away from the foundations of the genre for a thoughtfulness it can’t back up. The Swarm, it seems, is less interested in the substance of what it’s laid out for itself than the high-brow performance of intelligence that premise enables sets the scene for.
This is a trouble not specific to one film: accept it or reject it, the label of “prestige horror” has self-fulfilling prophesied itself into a real subgenre that for the moment is here to stay – and The Swarm is just its latest manifestation. Where the horror film can be anything it wants to be – a study of domesticity gone violently awry (The Shining, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), a lurid exercise in mood style (Suspiria, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), a pointed political comment (Get Out, Night of the Living Dead) – the prestige horror presupposes that the genre as we know it is something to stand above, and that in its performatively artful slowness, technical precision and faux-intellectualism it does just that.
But the end result is something that reduces promising ideas to rough sketches where individual pen strokes are meant to carry more weight than the illustration they cohere to: as it seems time and again to insist upon its own impressiveness The Swarm self-cannibalizes, too content to gnaw on the presumed merits of its filmmaking to explore or even complicate the basic ideas it’s already set out for itself. The issue of prestige horror persists: in the unbridgeable void between its conception — and the grisly terror that seems to suggest — and its execution, The Swarm insists that the only way to be about those things is to be about them seriously.
The spectacle is there in spare passages — when Virginie first discovers her insects’ taste for blood, when she begins to routinely bear her flesh for them to feed on, when they inevitably escape containment and freely devour anything in their path — and one gets the impression that somewhere in the recesses of Philippot’s mind is the same bloodlust that possesses the eponymous horde. If only he, like them, could let it out.
