“Swarm”, if the obsession with an (imaginary) pop star becomes horror (score 7.5)(score 7.5)- Corriere.it

The story of an obsession with the performance of celebrity with all its rituals of fame or fame à la Woody Allen, a thriller that starts and ends at the stations of a psychopathology deriving from unbridled and uncritical admiration and from the function of a fan. Because this “Swarm” conceived, written and directed by Danny Glover with his “Atlanta” collaborator Janine Nabers is, taken to extremes, the infiltrated story of madness of a girl who admires her pop star endlessly and does not accept criticism: in the if something or someone gets in the way, he kills himself. And the social voice asks: what would you be willing to do for the person you love the most? And this is how fan clubs can become toxic and instigators of serial murders, as happens in this case, with gore and trash moments.

A sign, before each of the short episodes of half an hour each of “Sciame” (Swarm, it is literal), hastens to inform and repeat that we are not dealing with fiction but with true things (reality, gentlemen, Pirandello’s six characters would say) that the well-informed connect to the fandom of Beyoncè as a prototype of this pop star who is called Ni’jah in the series and is a real diva, to whom real diva things happen, even a bite in the face during a party and so whoever wants to plays their games of comparison. The thriller is in the hallucinated eyes of the very good and almost annoying Dominique Fishback (seen in Show me a hero, The deuce, here also producer) who, while managing half a million followers for her star, lives isolated in her obsession and her mind it’s like a nest of bees that at a certain point begin to buzz around it. And so the terrible sadistic horror episodes happen in which some innocent people lose their lives guilty only of having overlapped between the Dre fan and his queen who he will meet at the end in an unexpected and fictitious happy ending that is in fact commented almost Brechtian.

But the series turns it’s like a tour of America, from Texas to California to Tennessee, leaving corpses in houses, gardens, cars without why. There is something intentional in the violence of the protagonist, which makes the screenwriter say that she resembles Haneke’s “Pianist” (maybe, debates open), while the other, more obvious reference title is “Elephant” by Gus Van Sant. Of course, the Afro-American protagonist holds an ancient suffering close to her, her looks are from an anthology of crime, as if she were always inserted into her own specific paranormality, an animal vitality that relates her to every American horror story by Ryan Murphy, every American psycho from Hitchcock onwards, every neon light reflecting in the blood scattered uselessly. We would then all have to analyze the female relationships between the obsessed Dre who lives only for the myth of the singing show and her friends who are enemies of hers including some peep show girls with whom she will have a tragic, nocturnal adventure. Among the surprises of the series scheduled on Prime video.com, the participation of Billie Eilish, the guest star Paris Jackson, Michael’s daughter and also (because perhaps racism has more to do with it than it seems) the participation, among the screenwriters, by Malia Obama, daughter of the president. Shot on film at the behest of Glover, “Swarm” with its invasive buzz in the key moments (but there are similar precedents of horror films with bees and the like) is capable of producing serious psycho-auditory annoyance and leaving us serious doubts about Why with a capital letter these things can happen.