(2020) The Swarm - A Festival Type of Movie Completely Different from Expectation

I gave this French movie a try because it seemed like a nice good old fashioned creature film, plus it was promoted as scary, horror and creature feature by Netflix. OK, I'll just head straight to it.

Brief Story Line

As a single mother, Virginie Hebrard (Suliane Brahim - Blind Spot etc) was having financial trouble and had to earn her living from farming locusts. The farm though was not truly successful and it also kept her teenaged daughter Laura (Marie Narbonne) a bit of exiled from her school friends. However, her younger brother Gaston (Raphael Romand) still enjoyed his life. Fortunately though, Virginie still got support from old family friend Karim (Sofian Khammes).

When she somehow found a way to turn her farm around, things looked for the better for Virginie. But, it did not take long before things started to fall apart. So what would happen to Hebrard family and their farm? Find them all in this movie.

End of Brief Story Line

Well that was truly disappointing for me personally. I was feeling excited when I started watching it, with the prospect of seeing locusts swarming and endangering people. But as the story progressed little by little, I soon realize that this did not seem like what I had in mind. The longer I waited, the more I felt uneasy and bored. I watched this with so many distractions, pausing, restarting, fell asleep and so on. Till I finally finished it after spending probably 4 hours in total.

Now the thing with this kind of movie, especially after seeing the info, synopsis and also the teaser trailer, when it failed to live up to expectation, it just made me upset and utterly disappointed. I personally am not anti watching this sort of movie, in fact if it was told to be a family drama movie of love and survival, I would be more receptive. I might not chose to watch it but even if I did, it would be because I opted to, not because I was misled.

The story itself was actually pretty good, showing the struggle Virginie had to endure to keep her family well fed while at the same time maintaining positive attitude. The locusts themselves rather than becoming the main attention, it became just a side note and did not really give any sense of suspense. There was a moment in the middle of the movie where I thought, OK finally we got to the good stuff, but once again it just passed by. And my disappointment did not stop there either. If only they made a different kind of ending (not the one they actually did), I would have probably be a lot more satisfied because it would feel like a full circle. 

The cast did their job pretty well with Suliane Brahim in particular. It is after all a festival movie, originally scheduled to be shown in 2020 Cannes Film festival but sadly the event was cancelled due to Covid-19 pandemic. If it had been shown, it probably would have been really appreciated as an artsy French movie. In the end, it might be a good movie for people who love this type of genre, but for casual audience like me, especially who had different expectations, it was not a satisfying experience at all.

Mike's movie moments rating: 2 out of 5 stars