Sommerleigh Pollonais, Horror Head Writer
Plot: To save her farm from bankruptcy a single mother begins a business of breeding edible grasshoppers. Soon she develops a strange, obsessive relationship with them.
Review: Well that was a waste of my horror viewing time! This week Netflix released French thriller The Swarm (original title La Nuée) about a single mom named Virgine (Sulaine Brahim) who has invested all her time and money in her locust farm. As many of you may know, there are people who focus on raising bugs like crickets and locusts as a sustainable food source for the future. Virgine is one of them, but her need to “save the world” has alienated her from her children Laura (Marie Narbonne) and Gaston (Raphael Romand), as well as the people in her remote home town. When she accidentally discovers the locusts’ love for blood, she begins feeding them (first with her own blood, then with buckets of animal blood, et cetera) and she notices a marked improvement in their breeding and growth. But her daughter hates the life they live and how much of an outsider it has made her with her schoolmates, who think her Mom is weird, so she does something stupid. And, well, the rest writes itself.
It’s a decent premise that suffers from the awful choice to have this movie be 80 per cent family drama and 20 per cent horror movie. I’m not even exaggerating folks. The only real action we get here happens in the final act of this film, making it feel like you’ve been cheated or tricked into watching. I wanted Arachnophobia with locusts but instead I got a family drama about a woman who is afraid to move forward with her life after losing her husband and in doing so has alienated everyone around her.
I recommend skipping this one. Don’t let the title trick you into thinking you’re in for some fun Man vs Nature thrills. The Swarm isn’t that. Or better yet, fast forward to the last chapter and pretend this is a horror short-film instead. Either way, you’ll save yourself a lot of wasted time.
Sommer’s Score: 4 out of 10
So did The Swarm bug you as much as it did me? And you can check out much better horror content below:
Sommerleigh of the House Pollonais. First of Her Name. Sushi Lover, Queen of Horror Movies, Comic Books and Binge Watching Netflix. Mother of two beautiful black cats named Vader and Kylo. I think eating Popcorn at the movies should be mandatory, PS4 makes the best games ever, and I’ll be talking about movies until the zombie apocalypse comes.
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