Year: 2022
Country: USA
Language: English
Genre: Thriller
Director/Screenwriter: Carter Smith
Music: Christopher Bear
Cinematography: Alexander W. Lewis
Editor: Eric Nagy
Cast:
Cooper Koch
Jose Colon
Jena Malone
Mark Patton
Roe Pacheco
Thee Suburbia
Rating: 6.3/10
Year: 2023
Country: USA
Language: English
Genre: Thriller
Director: Carter Smith
Screenwriter: Jack Stanley
Music: Christopher Bear
Cinematography: Lyn Moncrief
Editor: Eric Nagy
Cast:
Kyle Gallner
Johnny Berchtold
Liza Weil
Matthew Laureano
Jordan Sherley
Kanesha Washington
Lupe Leon
Billy Slaughter
Rating: 6.8/10
Masculine bonds are under a particularly psychosexual scrutiny in American queer filmmaker Carter Smith’s third and fourth feature, SWALLOWED and THE PASSENGER, both delimit its storyline within a taut 24-hour span.
SWALLOWED starts with two 20-something friends Benjamin (Koch) and Dom (Colon) in a small Maine town, sharing their last night out before the former heads out to L.A. to pursue a career in the pornographic profession. Thinking of earning some quick bucks as a parting gift to Benjamin, Dom accepts a nightly drug run to Canada. Under duress from the surly contract Alice (Malone), they are coerced to swallow five condoms containing an unknown substance (Dom 4, Benjamin 1) and subsequently cross the border without rousing any suspicion (a part which crucially negates the necessity of swallowing the drugs in the first place, they can simply hide them in the car), but the problem is the excretion. An unexpected punch in the stomach causes Dom to experience excruciating pain and other strange symptoms. When Alice brings them to a cabin in the woods, things only get more violent and vicious when her boss Rich (Patton, the incongruous combination of brutish appearance and swishy mannerism) manifests himself.
Shot on a shoestring with camera barely venturing out of medium shots, SWALLOWED puts intimacy in the forefront. Right out of the box during the clubbing scenes, it is palpable that Benjamin has hots for Dom, who seems avoidant towards the hormonal closeness, whether because he claims to be straight or it is the moment of leaves-taking, he does want to cave in for his weakness. The rapport between a gay man and his straight friend whom he has a crush on is a knowing cliche but Smith doesn’t want to cheapen their feelings and especially after the story takes a wrong turn, it is the two men’s heartfelt affection that becomes a mental support for Benjamin’s ensuing bold actions.
Another delicate and deliciously unfolded masculine interconnection is between Benjamin and Rich, an old queer who smacks his lips all over the former’s Adonis physique (full-front nudity is a must). The gamesmanship between a predator and his prey, and how the table is eventually turned. SWALLOWED is awash with such racy innuendos, like Dom’s prolonged erection as a side effect of the leaking drug (a close-up of Benjamin swallowing his saliva is a nifty tease), or Benjamin’s fist work to extract the condoms from Dom’s anus (thankfully, the film’s coprophiliac predilection doesn’t really aim for verisimilitude), all play up to salve the thirst of the film’s demographic. Koch makes a good introduction as a new queer leading man, but Malone’s Alice getting fridged unceremoniously is a letdown. She is tough-as-nail, her maternal solicitude only gets exuded gradually, and should be given more agency to operate.
THE PASSENGER transports audience to a rural Louisiana, Randy Bradley (Berchtold) is a self-effacing, unambitious 21-year-old fast food worker. One morning, his coworker Benson (Gallner) snaps up after Randy is bullied by another coworker Chris (Laureano), he murders everyone in the premises (body count 3) except Randy. After cleaning up the place and dumping the bodies in the freezer, they drive away, Randy becomes his hostage in the passenger seat. However, what follows is not exactly a killing spree, but a seemingly altruistic gesture from Benson to help Randy figure out why he is such a doormat.
So it is an odd-pair situation where one of them is a psychopathic killer, but surprisingly, Benson really goes out of his way to orchestrate a life-changing lesson for Randy without dissembling his menace and trigger-happy spontaneity: driving him around to meet Randy’s ex-girlfriend Lucy (Leon), to learn why he is dumped and later paying a visit to Ms. Beard (Weil), Randy’s second-grade teacher who is injured in a bloody accident which precipitates him to assume the pushover defense mechanism towards the society at large.
Without emplacing too many turn-ups for the books, THE PASSENGER earnestly invests its time and attention in carving out Randy’s new-found confidence in dissuading Benson from doing something irrational and violent. There are moments when it seems they can be quite a perfect fit because each is beneficent to the other, and maybe, a new lease on life can be granted even to a mortal sinner like Benson. Such fancy is punctured when a facile, workaday suicide-by-cop solution transpires in the end, and we still have no inkling what makes Benson such an enormity. As if people like him do not deserve salvation after all the effort the film endeavors to convince us he is not the impersonation of pure evil. Compared to Randy, Benson is the one who is more hurt for a savior, it is a pity Randy and the film fall by the wayside.
Be that as it may, the two leads are both in fine forms, Gallner is alternately a hog-wild, gun-toting monster and a persuasive, no-nonsense mentor capable of indoctrinate some self-esteem into a pipsqueak, who is rather superbly incarnated by an earnest, smoldering Berchtold, who has that uncanny gravitas and resolute to pull off Randy’s spiritual transmutation from an apathetic nonentity into the salt-of-the-earth type.
So if SWALLOWED is a guilty-pleasure delight with its conspiratorial parody of transgression and subcultural defiance, THE PASSENGER demonstrates Smith’s more open-armed stance of touching the tenderest part of humanity, and establishes him as a filmmaker to be reckoned with.
referential entries: Carlo Mirabella-Davis’s SWALLOW (2019, 6.9/10); Sebastián Silva’s ROTTING IN THE SUN (2023, 7.4/10).
Cinema Omnivore 