It's our second-last spooky film for Mubi Monday in October, and we're talking about the highly politicised "tiramisu" film: Swallow.
The film follows a housewife with vintage dresses perfectly pressed and short blonde bob curled closer to doll-than-human. Hunter - who increasingly resembles another horror would-be-mother as the film goes on - develops pica during her pregnancy with her difficult and controlling husband.
Stemming from director Carlo Mirabella-Davis' own family experience:
"The film was inspired by my grandmother, a 1950s homemaker who, as a response to a difficult marriage, developed various rituals of control. She was an obsessive hand washer who would go through four bars of soap a day and 12 bottles of sanitizing alcohol a week. I think she was looking for order in a life she felt increasingly powerless in. My grandfather, at the behest of the doctors, put my grandmother in a mental institution where she was given electroshock therapy, insulin shock therapy, and a non-consensual lobotomy which they botched resulting in the loss of her sense of taste and smell. I always felt that there was something punitive about how my grandmother was treated, that she was being punished for not living up to society’s expectations of what they felt a wife and a mother should be, and for being different. "
The film perfectly manipulates the real life horrific circumstances you are only millimeters away from as a woman, even one who is loved.