Warning: This article contains key plot spoilers for Amazon Prime Video’s “Swarm.”
After a tragic accident that leaves her devastated, Dominique Fishback’s “Dre” clings to her favorite popstar — and murder — to cope. Show creators Donald Glover and Janine Nabers drew from a myriad of real and rumored events to spin this twisted tale that has left viewers buzzing since its debut on March 17. Yet, what has captivated fans the most is a lingering feeling of terror that grips them through the screen.
Fresh off the heels of “Atlanta,” Glover’s most recent project, “Swarm” drills into Dre’s life, her fandom and an unrelenting “habit” of killing. Whenever she encounters someone not reverent enough of her favorite artist Ni’jah, they end up on Dre’s long list of ravenous and messy attempts to “protect” the artist — always with the closest brutal object at her disposal.
With the help of Nabers and much of his foundational crew from “Atlanta,” Glover has created the next installation in popular TV and film that infuses horror into drama. At its core, this creepy mini-series carries a similar quietude that made Glover’s hit series so compelling, this time more eerie than serene. Watching “Swarm” feels like a weight slowly pressing into your chest. This crew has heavy and woozy down-packed.
“We were really interested in creating an antihero story,” Nabers told Vanity Fair, “through the lens of a Black, modern-day woman.” Fishback’s offbeat character challenges the typical portrayal of the antihero in film, and she sends viewers reeling as they try to sort out such an unassuming yet ruthless killer.
Glover only doubles down on his trademark combination of the ordinary and the weird with the series’ unsettling soundtrack. The sound of bees buzzing, Dre panting and her victims screaming cuts through the dialogue with enough force to send a chill all the way from the spine to the toes.
But the show’s insistence on being “true” is the most disturbing aspect of the entire series. For starters, every episode begins with a title card that reads “this is not a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is intentional.” Each episode contains subtle and overt references to actual events or Internet rumors that have circulated about fans being obsessed with celebrities. And at the center of it all is Dre and the on-the-nose correlation between Ni’Jah’s Killer Bees and Beyoncé's BeyHive.
Some of the Beyoncé parallels are obvious like the Ni’jah visual album as a nod to Beyoncé's 2018 hit visual album “Lemonade” or the Jay-Z and Solange-edge elevator attack. But one odd reference you may have missed was that Dre biting Ni’jah in Episode 3 is based on a story comedian Tiffany Haddish told about Beyoncé being bitten by a fan.
This insistence comes to a head in episode six when the story format shifts to documentary style. The episode introduces Loretta Greene, a detective who has been following a string of murders she eventually links to Andrea Greene (meant to invoke “Dre”). The viewer immediately questions whether what they have been watching for the past five episodes has actually been a dramatization of real events all along. And, in a way, the answer is yes. The show does dramatize reality, but not in the way the episode purports. Don’t worry, Loretta Greene is not a real detective and she is not investigating Andrea Greene’s murders. Remember: this is Donald Glover and the mockumentary is his thing.
Glover and his “Swarm”/“Atlanta” crew used the same narrative technique in an episode of “Atlanta” titled “The Goof Who Sat by the Door.” In an interview with the LA Times, Nabers reminds viewers that every insinuation of reality is very intentional.
“Episode 6 is a step-out episode that allows us to intellectualize some of the stuff that we’ve seen in a way that we probably haven’t intellectualized before.”
“Swarm” makes us think — about our addiction to social media, about the lengths that people will go to protect the ones we love and about steaming, unwavering desire. The fear that “Swarm” evokes is not only a feeling of blood-curdling terror but the feeling that love and loss could catalyze dangerous obsession is all too real.