1-1-1: Swarm

2023, d. Donald Glover, Adamma Ebo, Ibra Ake, Stephen Glover
7 episodes - AmazonPrime
created by Donald Glover and Adamma Ebo

The Plot 100:

Dre is the consummate "weird girl", the one who doesn't seem to fit in, who doesn't seem to get normal social cues, who stares too long at things, who moves oddly, who dresses strangely...who fixates...and Dre is fixated on superstar Beyonce-stand-in Ni'Jah. Dre lives with Marissa, her best (and only) friend, who looks out for her, but that's a full time job, and Marissa is trying to live her own life. A confluence of events unhinge Dre, sending her on a low-key murder spree across America.

1-1-1
1 Great: Dominique Fishback has been a power player as supporting actress in movies like Judas and the Black Messiah and Project Power but in Swarm the spotlight is all on her. Her performance as Dre is captivating, full of incredible nuance in physical presence, facial expression and line delivery. Fishback delivers a dead-eyed stare that will send a cold shiver up your spine like few others ever have.  Dre is barely tethered to reality when Marissa is grounding her, but without Marissa around, Dre is let loose on the world. 

As part of "The Swarm", the collective of Ni'Jah fans who shout down any naysayer or troll online, Dre takes the next steps to protecting her queen.  She goes to great lengths to hunt down the online trolls and murder them. It takes a special performance to sell the leap into murder, but not only does Fishback sell it, she makes it seem both the logical and inevitable next step for Dre. There's a fearlessness to the character, and to Fishback's performance. It's a very, very difficult thing to be funny and sympathetic in a performance that is also supposed to be terrifying, Fishback manages to be all these things in different combinations. Never is this more clear than in the second episode where Dre has taken a gig stripping and is mesmerisingly bad at it, and doesn't seem to care. She just kind of clomps around on stage in a teddy, a vacant look on her face, bewildering the one onlooker who seems like a deer in headlights.  She's not going to kill him, but he's definitely her victim.

It's hard to really like Dre, but in script and production, there is empathy for the show's protagonist, and since she is our only POV character, we always kind of want Dre to get what she wants, even if logically we know she just needs to be stopped. There are a couple instances of Dre killing an awful person, but she is by no means a sympathetic vigilante...she is a sociopathic murderer and her killings are just as often whims as they are pre-planned. 

I watched the 7 episodes in 2 chunks, the first three episodes, and then the final four about a week later. Between viewings, I was constantly thinking about the show. There was nothing in particular I was thinking about, but it was just more kind of haunting me. It would find myself thinking about Fishback's slack-jawed gaze, or her stilted physicality, or her line reading of "who's your favourite artist?", which becomes just as ominous a line as "do you like scary movies?" Perhaps moreso.

1 Good: Donald Glover's Atlanta [Season 1, Season 3, Season 4] was a unique production, a series of mini-films that sometimes featured the main cast, and were sometimes fully detached from even its own reality. The first episode of Swarm felt like it could have been one of Atlanta's one-off episodes, except that it didn't feel as self-contained, that it was building something. Each episode of Swarm has a tonal synergy with Atlanta, a quietness, a patience, but also an intensity and a sly sense of humour.  

This isn't solely Glover's baby, Janine Nabers (UnREAL), but the style seems very much guided by what Glover and team did for Atlanta with much success. Though a graduated story, each episode does stand alone as a unique thing. Episode 4, for instance finds Dre taken in by a commune led by Billie Eilish, which really twists the knife...you kind of want Dre to run, but at the same time, she's probably more trouble for the commune, and maybe you just want them both to self immolate. It takes some psychedelic turns.  The final episode is a love story, which, like every episode of Atlanta, you're just waiting for it to turn.  The thing with Atlanta was it only turned like 40% of the time. You can bet any good thing for Dre is going to tun 100% of the time.  It's like watching Dexter or Barry, where you just utterly sympathize with the love interest and want them to get the hell away, but at the same time that little glimmer of hoping the sociopath can learn to be happy and let go of their darker instincts. It never works out.

Each episode opens with the title cards "This is not a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is intentional." It's Glover and Nabers "Fargo-izing" the series, which then leads to Episode six, which is a documentary news program covering the "real" story of Dre, and the detective who pieced together that there was a Black female serial killer operating in America.  While trying to be a "real" documentary, its scripted-ness gives itself away (kind of like Atlanta Season 4's "The Blackest movie of all time" documentary on A Goofy Movie).  

1 Bad: Not really bad, but more a stylistic thing that I had a hard time parsing. There are a couple instances of Dre going into a sort of hallucinatory trance, and we see the world from this perspective. As such we're not really clear on the events that are occurring.  Mainly the climax of episode 3 and the series climax of episode 7.  

Episode 7, in particular, is titled "Only God makes happy endings" and it ends with Dre having her greatest dream come true. But clearly it's not true, just a delusional state that they're in. Episode six actually tells us the "real life" ending that we don't see in the show. It actually seems much darker a spin to even attempt a happy ending for Dre. If she gets her greatest desire, given her cross-country killing spree, what does that even mean? It's certainly provocative. The whole show is provocative.

META
It's kind of shocking how under-the-radar Swarm is right now. It doesn't seem to be getting promoted very intensely nor does it seem to be popping up in television discourse very much. It's a difficult show to market because it isn't the most accessible story, but it's, at its heart, elevated horror. It very well could fit cozily within A24's slate of genre films, and Amazon should be reaching for the same market.  It's an intense, unconventional show, defiantly not for everyone. 

I only heard of it in passing, with a brief mention of Donald Glover. That was all I needed.