Stream It or Skip It: ‘The Swarm’ on Netflix, a French Horror Flick About Locusts and the Woman Who Loves Them Maybe a Little Too Much

Netflix movie The Swarm (La nuee) will pique your interest if you always thought domestic dramas just didn’t have enough bloodthirsty insects in them. Director Just Philippot’s debut casts Suliane Brahim (of Netflix series Black Spot) as a single mom raising two kids and a lot of delicious, nutritious locusts, which she grills into snacks or grinds into flour. Protein! But what happens when the tables are turned? Irony, my friends. Irony.

THE SWARM: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Rural France. Overhead shot: A geodesic dome made of plastic sheeting. Inside-the-oven cam: a tray of crispy locusts quietly bakes. So do you use canola oil or olive oil or their own juices or what? Just curious! Virginie (Brahim) has a buyer, but she doesn’t have enough product to satisfy his needs, so he buys none of it. Is he a farm-to-table restaurateur? I assume so? Anyway, the problem is, the locusts just aren’t robust. They’re not laying eggs, and Virginie can’t pay the bills. She has to hit up her friend and fellow farmer — of perfectly normal grapes, for perfectly normal wine — Karim (Sofian Khammes) for a loan. Again. He’s happy to help, because Virginie’s late husband, a farmer of perfectly normal goats, helped him out. And there are Virginie’s children to think about, Gaston (Raphael Romand) and his older teenage sister Laura (Marie Narbonne).

All kinds of pressures are mounting. The locusts apparently don’t want to f—. Laura is bullied at school because her mother is a nutty bug lady and her dad was a goofy goat guy; she’s also mortified by the grubby state of their home and pissed about the solar panels because the shower’s always cold. She has a point — several points. Gaston is mostly happy because he’s younger and less aware of their troubles. He has a beloved pet goat named Huguette, and likes the locusts, keeping a few in a terrarium in his bedroom. He picks up one of the hoppers, and it seems interested in the owie on his finger. Curious. Virginie secures another buyer, who’s looking for duck feed. But the deal falls apart and she snaps and starts busting up the greenhouse and slips and gashes her arm and hits her head and when she comes to, the locusts are going to town on a puddle of her blood. Protein!

Soon enough, the locusts have perked up. They’re molting and eating their own shells and laying eggs by the bucketful. Maybe they’re a little more aggressive than before, but that’s surely nothing to worry about. Virginie removes the bandage from her arm and treats it with a little Bactine and goes on with her day and makes dinner for the kids and hugs them and goes to bed and then the movie ends. No! She exposes the cut and sticks her arm directly into an enclosure teeming with locusts, and they go bananas. Cue a close-up shot of Virginie tweezing barbed bug appendages from her oozing wound, and it lingers long enough that we don’t even have to freeze-frame it to fully appreciate it, which is so very thoughtful of the movie. She keeps all this to herself, surely not because it’s a disturbing display of nature gone psychotically awry, but probably to prevent corporate theft, since business soon ramps up. Before you know it, her farmland is covered with greenhouses just teeming with vampire grasshoppers. She’s going to corner the edible locust market even if it kills her.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Take The Birds and make it The Bugs, and you’ve pretty much got this movie. Also, take the obsessiveness of Michael Shannon’s character from Take Shelter and blend it with a far more troubling and far less magical Sally Hawkins-in-The Shape of Water vibe, and you’ve got Virginie. (Postscript: Do not confuse this film with 1978’s The Swarm, which is about bees, and isn’t exactly the high point of Michael Caine’s career.)

Performance Worth Watching: Without revealing too much, Brahim mostly Goes There psychologically, nonverbally exploring the deep, dark desperation of her character.

Memorable Dialogue: “BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ” — not the goat

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: I guess The Swarm is what happens when you stop putting the sweat and tears into your life’s work and just concentrate on the blood. Karim has a point when he suggests maybe Virginie should return to the nursing profession, a comment that he surely doesn’t want the locusts to overhear, and surely foreshadows his destiny. Philippot directs the hell out of the movie, parsing out the money shots and sticking primarily with skin-crawly practical FX for maximum horrific-dramatic effect.

The director also draws a quietly dynamic I-don’t-even-wanna-know performance from Brahim, who’s the focus of a movie that’s a convincing amalgam of family drama, character piece and creature feature. In Virginie we see a wild portrait of single motherhood: Her failures as a provider for her children leads to masochistic self-punishment; her ambition and desire to keep her endeavor afloat ultimately renders her a matriarchal queen of the locusts. The manner in which she feeds and feeds the business, building more and more greenhouses and breeding more and more bugs, stems from a strange subconscious source, as if sharing her bodily humours has made her one with the locusts.

I will say the film stops short of being too freaky and Cronenbergian, Philippot showing restraint where others might go for the full-on grotesque gusto. Maybe the film is better for that, maybe it’s not, but its subtlety and suggestiveness are refreshing. Philippot’s approach is straightforward, sidestepping the arch, auteurist tones of neo-arthouse horror. So its earnestness is refreshing too, the director wisely sticking with the fundamental squidginess of entomophobia, which is something so many of us express whenever we stomp a spider as it scurries across the kitchen tile. Perhaps it goes without saying that bug-o-phobes who aren’t up for confronting their mostly irrational fears may want to watch Resort to Love instead.

Our Call: The Swarm is a creatively successful debut for Philippot, who successfully cultivates our empathy for the characters, making the threats against them all the more effective. STREAM IT, then hit the nearest Walmart for six cases of Raid.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream The Swarm on Netflix