In the show’s best moments, the premise serves as an attention-grabbing, plot-propelling armature for a story that promises, for a while at least, to be more interesting than that.Īnd these episodes’ introduction of Dre, an odd, childlike, barely employed young woman eking out an existence in Houston in 2016, has a visceral, emotional texture that pulls you in and makes you curious.
“Swarm” doesn’t really seem to be about fans or tweets, however, or for that matter about Beyoncé (although its correlation of Ni’Jah with Beyoncé, and its allusion to the BeyHive fan army, is startlingly on-the-nose). Her serial violence is the dark-comic foundation for the show’s satire of fan culture and social media, and its depiction of their effect on someone who has always felt like an outcast. “Swarm” is about a young Black woman, Dre (Dominique Fishback), who is obsessed with a Beyoncé-style pop star named Ni’Jah when she encounters people who are not sufficiently reverential of her heroine, she dispenses swift, blunt justice via sledgehammer, kettlebell, cast-iron frying pan or whatever other heavy object is at hand. It’s not hard to understand why more and more filmmakers are choosing the horror genre for stories set in contemporary America, particularly those involving the lives of people outside the white-male protective bubble. That “Swarm” is only intermittently successful doesn’t make it any easier to look away from the screen. Fresh off the November finale of his singular comedy-not-comedy “Atlanta,” Donald Glover is back with “Swarm,” a creepy little mini-series (seven half-hour episodes premiered Friday on Amazon Prime Video) that tries to achieve some of that earlier show’s disorienting, disquieting effects in the context of horror.
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