The Swarm is a 2021 Netflix horror film made by the French director. Jusi Philipott. The movie is a modest affair and frightening, I suppose, if you have a dislike for grasshoppers. Grasshoppers make an unlikely monster, although hordes have them have been pressganged into service in horror movies before, notably in John Boorman's very weird The Exorcist II - the Heretic. There's an interesting book on fear of insects written by the Laramie, Wyoming professor Jeffrey Lockwood (The Infested Mind) that has some interesting observations on this topic -- the author notes that when locusts accumulate in a certain density measured as bugs per square meter, even entomologists such as himself experience momentary panic. The Swarm exploits this primordial fear and embeds its horrors within a gloomy tale about a dysfunctional family. The movie is pretty effective, but not very much fun and the locust's assaults aren't photogenic -- they have to be visualized in their aftermath, that is, bloody corpses with hundreds of grasshoppers posed rather incongruously amidst the carnage.
A single mother is raising her two children, Laura and Gaston, on a farm in rural France. The mother, Virginie, apparently has been an organic farmer, albeit unsuccessfully -- we gather that her husband killed himself at the farm's goat shed. Virginie is cultivating grasshoppers for protein. The insects are roasted and sold as meal for domestic animals, particularly ducks, it seems. (You can also eat them as a tasty grilled treat). Mother and daughter are in conflict over the the family's vocation. The local kids bully Laura and Gaston about raising grasshoppers for food. In an early scene, a mean boy taunts the teenaged Laura -- she punches him and he punches back giving her a black-eye. Later, however, the boy tries to flirt with her, unsuccessfully, and one senses that he's not altogether despicable.
Virginie is raising her bugs in a geodesic dome. When a purchaser shorts her on a grasshopper meal transaction, she snaps, runs amok, and smashes up part of the dome cutting herself badly. She passes out and the hoppers feed on her blood, thereby acquiring an unhealthy taste for the stuff. Virginie realizes that if she nourishes the swarm on animal blood, the insects grow more quickly, molt more effectively, and are ready to harvest sooner. Unfortunately, the critters become dependent on blood. When her plasma supplier cuts her off, Virginie starts feeding her crop on her own blood. (Clearly, this is a metaphor for maternal love gone berserk.) She opens her veins and sloshes blood into the hanging cocoons where the critters are raised and, at times, squats naked in an inferno of flying insects so that they can graze on her skin directly. Of course, the local farm animals quickly fall prey to the swarm -- the family's goat, a souvenir of the suicidal father, ends up eaten by the bugs as does a neighbor's dog. The situation isn't sustainable, of course -- the film's plot is a combination of vampire movie (Virginie's increasing need for blood to feed her swarm) and bug horror show. In the end, the swarm gets free and, of course, all hell breaks lose. The insect attacks don't like much of anything because grasshoppers seem rather bovine and placid -- it's hard to portray them as malevolent. The film is carefully plausible once one accepts the central premise of literally blood-thirsty grasshoppers. It's only toward the last ten minutes when the characters, as in all horror movies, start making some really bad decisions, in typical monster movie fashion, hustling toward obvious peril as opposed to doing what any sane person would do in similar circumstances, that is, run like hell. The ending is pretty scary but contrived so that the director doesn't really have to show the swarm doing much of anything since that special effect was, apparently, beyond the picture's modest budget. (There's an interesting aquatic variant on the scene in Hitchcock's The Birds when the fowl besiege Tippi Hedren in a phone booth.) The happy ending seems contrived and ineffective.
The Swarm is a garden variety monster movie, made on a low-budget, with several impressively creepy scenes, but really too restrained to be effective as horror and too horrible to be effective as a family drama.
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