“Listen, nobody wanted it to happen like this:” In the trailer for Carter Smith’s “Swallowed,” two friends go from a melancholic goodbye to being mired in a drug deal gone nightmarishly wrong. Benjamin (Cooper Koch) and Dom (Jose Colon) are two friends in a backwoods Maine town. While Benjamin is set to move to Los Angeles and attempt to break into the world of gay porn, Dom tries to do the right thing by offering Benjamin a way to score some quick cash. Instead, the gets pair roped up in a drug run overseen by the relentless Alice (Jena Malone). What follows is body horror set against an eerie rural setting, and a friendship stretched to psychological extremes, with the trailer promising to feature a variety of squirm-inducing scenes.
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Carter Smith returns with his first film in nearly a decade, having directed “Jamie Marks Is Dead” in 2014. He reunites with Jena Malone (“Inherent Vice,” “The Neon Demon”), who co-starred in his 2008 “The Ruins,” which features a group of friends trying to evade carnivorous plants in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Malone is a welcome sight in the trailer for Smith’s trailer, as the actor has provided quality performances in several films in the last two decades, including films from Tom Ford, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Gaspar Noe. The cast for “Swallowed” is rounded out by Mike Patton, who is best known for starring in “A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, directed by Jack Sholder.
“Swallowed” is set to premiere on VOD and on digital on February 14 via Momentum Pictures.
