The French director Just Phillippot interprets horror in an authorial way in this film about locusts that feed on blood. The review of The Swarm by Federico Gironi.
It’s easy to say, as many people say today, “I’m giving up everything and going to live in the countryside”. Because being a farmer, a breeder, a farmer is a very tough job. To be able to live doing it, you have to give blood.
And who knows, maybe the Frenchman here didn’t start from this very thought Just Philippot for his debut film, The swarm, even if the subject and screenplay are not his. A film about a woman who, with a thousand difficulties, raises grasshoppers, and who discovers that they thrive if she feeds them with blood (first her blood, then not only her blood), thus encountering terrible and horrifying consequences.
Technically it could have been a creatures feature, The swarm. Or rather, a natural horror. And in a way it is. But forget the fiercely B-Movie style of many examples from the fifties or seventies, or certain contemporary pop re-enactments like Stung (the horror comedy with giant wasps from a few years ago): why The swarm It won’t be A24-badged, but it is anyway a film that attempts to decline the genre more according to authorial coordinates, rather than going towards the B series. And that the film had been selected for the Critics’ Week 2020an edition later canceled due to the pandemic, is a clear indication of Philippot’s intentions and result.
The swarm clearly favors psychology over exploitation. Its story and its images, rather than repellent or disturbing, are filled with a sense of anguish linked directly to the state of mind of the protagonists. In particular of the protagonist Virginie (Suliane Brahimwhich in some places and from certain angles can almost seem like a kind of Charlotte Gainsbourg less elegant and charming), a widow with two children on the verge of bankruptcy who is so obsessed with the success of her super-protein insect breeding that she takes reckless steps.
And there it is an image, powerful and disturbingin the film – the image of Virginie who is seen by her daughter Laura feeding her locusts with her own blood, which cover her almost entirely while she is crouched on the ground – which almost parallels his obsession with that of The Mosc’s Seth Brundleto.
On the other hand, if Virginie is literally forced to give blood, as was said at the beginning, to make her breeding profitable, it is because the farmers, she says between the lines Philippot in his film, they are burdened by problems, bureaucracies, rivalries that push them towards very dangerous ridges. With the consequences that this push can have, even in the real world.
The opening of The swarm the real world is also affected by the right-wing tendencies of today’s France: with those who make cruel irony about the “disgusting” locust flour produced by Virginie, as well as certain politicians of our house, and with a joke put into the mouth of a side character of North African origin, who tells her friend Virginie something like “without you and your husband they would never have given the land to an Arab like me”.
Perhaps fans of more hard core horror will find the construction of The Swarm vaguely slow, and its work more on psychology and suggestion than on explicitness a little disappointing. But if you adopt the right perspective, Philippot’s is a film whose story is able to stick to the viewer in a way that is as uncomfortable as it is effective, and which is capable of putting some powerful images on the screen. The candidacy obtained at Cesar as best first work, therefore, it was not at all undeserved.
