Two kids. A husband. A house in the suburbs. Bowling. Apple Pie.
The Swerve introduces us to the dread of its world in everyday, comfortable objects. More thriller than horror, this directorial and writer debut from Dean Kapsalis focuses on the terror of finding yourself living a life you don’t really like. There are no ghosts, no intruders, no deadly curses – just the promise of The American Dream failing to measure up to what you expected, and the question of how you handle that disappointment. Will our protagonist swerve away from its direction?
Or maybe she has already?
The Swerve stars Azura Skye as Holly, a teacher, mother, wife, and sister who is going through the motions of keeping her life intact as she feels herself falling apart inside. Holly’s children mostly ignore her or treat her as a house maid; her husband has been coming home later and later under the guise of “working”; her sister has returned home to recover from addiction and fester old wounds; a seemingly indestructible mouse has taken up residence in her home; and the most attention she gets in any given day is from inappropriate interactions from a male high school student. We only see a few days of this, but it’s clear the unhappiness has been festering for years.
On top of these issues, which render Holly virtually invisible, she’s dealing with crippling insomnia that rules most of her nights and leaves her groggy and confused during the day. Add that to disordered eating and depression, and Holly’s state from one moment to the next ranges from checked out to on edge. She’s barely keeping it together when a fight with her sister leads her to drive home in a fury, which incites a dangerous incident of road rage. The only problem is that Holly can’t tell if it really happened or if she’s just losing her grip on reality.
One movie I thought of when finishing The Swerve was American Beauty. The two share similarities – the horror of being trapped in an unhappy life in the suburbs, of being unappreciated, of going nowhere – but take starkly opposite approaches in story telling. American Beauty is about the protagonist deciding he deserves happiness and ridding himself from the norms or expectations of others, while The Swerve is about a woman who can’t escape those expectations. Perhaps the two polar dynamics are a fair reflection on the pressures of mothers and women as compared to men. Either way, as a result, the tone is also vastly different, launching it into another genre entirely. The Swerve conjures an unstoppable sense of dread, putting the audience in Holly’s shoes as she wonders how much longer she can live with that feeling and whether it will ever change.
While the tone is dark, at a brisk 90-ish minutes, The Swerve never manages to overstay its welcome. Kapsalis deserves much of the credit for that, and this is a stellar debut for the director. But it feels like the success of the film rests on Skye’s performance. As far as flaws go, they mostly orbit around Skye’s character. The sudden passion and obsession of her student, for example, feels a little cliche and at times bizarre. And the drama with her sister doesn’t feel as impactful as it was probably intended. However jolting her journey, though, Skye makes every step feel believable. She’s firing on every cylinder, surrounded by co-stars and sub-plots with varying levels of success, but simultaneously managing to put on a one-woman show, and in doing so delivering one of the best performances I’ve seen this year.
The Swerve is available on VOD starting Tuesday, Sept 22.