Teddy Grennan’s Swing Low tells the story of Harper Sykes (Annabelle Dexter-Jones) a nature photographer. We are introduced to her as she sits, covered head to toe in bandages. Harper is retelling her tale of being brutalized by a gang of men to a skeptical to say the least police officer.

From there the story wastes no time. Harper is catching her soon to be attackers in the process of mercilessly dispatching a timber and mineral prospector. According to the aggressors,  the prospector threatens to destabilize their quiet country town. The leader of the gang of monstrous men is Ravener, (played hauntingly by Robert Longstreet) who is not only a connoisseur of torture but someone who truly relishes in it creating a terrifying antagonist.

The two words I would describe this movie as would be “tasteful violence”. This might be an oxymoron but bear with me. Every bit of violence and ugliness in this film is handled in a way to perfectly execute its purpose while not reveling in it. One scene, in particular, has one of Harper’s attackers gloating about the awfulness that they forced on her when she was bound, suddenly finding himself helpless at her mercy. Harper reaches off camera and we expect the worst. A rock bashing or maybe a stab from her knife. Instead, she smothers him with an old farm glove. There is an artistic touch that softens the horror of it all.

Normally this film would fall into the horror sub-genre of rape-revenge movies such as Last House on the Left and I Spit on your Grave but Swing Low instead becomes its own sub-genre of rape survival. At the beginning of the film Grennan makes it a point to inform us that Harper is a nature photographer, showing her living in the forest, catching her own food. She is clever and resourceful. By the time we see her escape her captors and again start foraging for supplies, we know that this is one woman these men should not pursue. From beginning to end the cat and mouse game keeps escalating in tragic and terrifying ways until it ends leaving the audience breathless, myself included.