The best horror films will always make you question everything. Even when one thinks they have it all figured out, there will always be little gems that will juxtapose what you think you know and subvert that concept tenfold. Director Carter Smith takes everything about horror, gore, ambition, and morbid intimacy and quietly and unnervingly overturns it all with Swallowed.

The film centers on childhood friends Benjamin (Cooper Koch) and Dom (Jose Colon), who go on a drug run for what they assume is easy money and quickly discover that it is anything but. When Dom starts to fall sick from the "unique" drug that has entered his system, Benjamin must struggle to save Dom and himself from a drug-induced nightmare they will never forget.

What makes Swallowed so fascinating is Smith's connection to intimacy and the drugs that Benjamin and Dom get their hands on. Before the drug run, Smith paints a picturesque depiction of two friends exploring an emotional connection that is more than it reads on the surface. Because Benjamin is heading to California to become a gay adult entertainer, Dom's score for cash on this drug run means something more. How far would one be willing to go to assist a friend in achieving their dreams if one could do anything in the name of love? Smith illustrates this by using drugs, passion, and intimacy in their most unsettling and unadulterated forms.

Once Dom and Benjamin transition, in a matter of moments, from this comforting and carefree space and enter the dark and terrifying world, they, in many ways, leave behind their innocence. Each faces death when Alice, Dom's contact, forces them to swallow multiple bags of mysterious illegal drugs at gunpoint, with Benjamin ingesting the last one. This produces a deadly chain reaction after an altercation ensues at a public rest area on the side of a road. The only way to release the bags after swallowing them is to purge them from the other end. Once innocent interactions between the pair quickly turn into actions of comfort and survival. Benjamin's use of intimacy and physical contact become an instrument of perseverance for saving Dom, from consoling him to removing the bags of narcotics from his body.

Intimacy and nudity are used again as Benjamin's line of defense and a weapon against his kidnapper Rich, the drug dealer to which they were transporting the drugs, with Benjamin ultimately finding redemption despite his loss. While the transition from body horror to survival horror falters in small places, its crucial points lie in the disturbing revelation of what these drugs are and Cooper Koch's compelling performance in telling a unique horror/thriller-driven narrative of how romance and ambition fuel one to survive against all odds. When it seems as if villains Alice and Rich have the higher ground, protagonists such as Benjamin creatively, through their cunning wit and sexual confidence, take that power back.