Curiosity turns into obsession, and obsession turns into something even darker and scarier. Created by Donald Grover and Janine Nabers, Swarm is an American psychological horror series that follows the story of a young girl and how her obsession with a pop star takes all sorts of dark turns.
Released on March 17th, 2023, Swarm picks up the dark humor route to exploring the life of Dre, played by Dominique Fishback, a young girl who is a fan of the singer Ni’ Jah, almost similar to real-life Beyonce, and is a part of that singer’s fan club called, The Swarm. The show takes us through this fan’s life and how it makes her do twisted things.
The show stars Nirine S. Brown as Ni’ Jah, the singer Andrea Green or Dre is obsessed with. Singer and actress Chloe Bailey play the role of Marissa Jackson, Dre’s sister, and Karen Rodriguez as Erica, Marissa’s best friend, and boss. The show has an ensemble of actors that appear in different episodes.
With all seven episodes, the show premiered on Prime Videos for streaming purposes. Since its release, viewers and critics have garnered positive responses, with special appreciation towards Dominique Fishback’s acting as Dre Greene.
Swarm Plotline
The story of Swarm starts in Houston in 2016; two girls, Dre and Marissa, are best friends, soulmates, and part of the same fan club. During their teens, they had a Twitter account for their idol, Ni’ Jah, called ‘the Swarm,’ but now, as busy working adults, they find themselves busy with life.
Dre does not seem to have changed much, though, as she spends money on her icon instead of on important things like rent or groceries. She still runs that Twitter account, and it is clear that Dre is the irresponsible, childish one out of the two, whereas Marissa is still not that socially incapable.
The two are clingy in the most toxic and harmful way possible. Dre has no life of her own and has only Marissa and Ni’ Jah in the center of her universe. Marissa tries to address the weirdness of their relationship, but when Dre does not listen, the former tells her that she plans on moving in with her creepy boyfriend, Khalid.
Dre loses her virginity overnight, and Marissa dies at her home. Dre, upon finding that she was in the club having sex when Marissa was probably dying, has a full-blown mental breakdown. Something clicks in her brain when she is not allowed to attend Marissa’s funeral, and she decides to go on a killing spree.
The Start Of Something
She kills Khalid first, an obvious choice. Dre killing people is not just a simple act of murder, she makes it look like an act of horror, and it is cathartic to watch, as creepy as it sounds. We skip to 2017. Dre is working at a club in Tennessee when she is approached by a girl named Hailey.
This is where she commits her second and third murder, Hailey’s abusive boyfriend, again no explanations required, and Hailey, because she was not a Ni’Jah fangirl. But she had another motive to be in Tennessee: to get the guy who had been shitting all over Marissa’s death on Twitter.
Our little serial killer comes across the guy accidentally and indirectly manages to get him killed, leading to her being on the run from the police again. Marissa continues to pop up through the episode in flashbacks or during cold openings.
Marissa’s death has badly affected Dre, and the videos she has of the two from their teen years, hyping each other for being Ni’ Jah’s protectors and bodyguards, fuel present Dre’s obsession with the latter. Since her second escape, Dre has taken it upon herself to escape the Twitter wars and deal with Ni’Jah’s haters in reality. She indulges in this behavior to maintain some twisted connection with the dead Marissa. So she takes her gears and commits a fourth murder.
Dre is unlike a normal serial killer who meticulously thinks the act through and performs it while savoring every precious moment. She mentions she does not necessarily do it out of joy or for satisfaction, but it is almost as if she is being guided through all this by Marissa. She enjoys the process of cleaning the mess up more than the act of committing the crime.
She goes after her fifth prey in Los Angeles, Alice Dudley, who had called out Ni’Jah for her problematic lyrics. While Dre was after Dudley, she bumped into a guy named George, who had access to Ni’Jah’s husband’s concert tickets. Ni’Jah has plans to attend the concert, and this was Dre’s probably only chance to be near her, trying her best to befriend the guy.
The two hit it off with their addictions and binge eating, while Dre plans on stealing the tickets. She manages to get to the concert and does everything she can to squeeze herself into the afterparty. Eventually, she finds herself face-to-face with the legend, her idol, the one and only, Ni’Jah.
She bites her face, literally, and that is how their meeting goes. Things spiral from there as Dre is followed by a cop, stuck in a cult, and then kills too many people with a random person’s car. As the show progresses, Ni’Jah becomes more and more like a ghostly presence, where we know she exists, but she is not the story’s core.
Back To Where It Started
Through some events, Dre is forced to return to Houston, where she meets Erica, Marissa’s boss. She lies about her whereabouts, and she does it pretty well. She then visits Marissa’s home, threatening her mother to switch Marissa’s phone line off. Marissa’s father intervenes and blames her for his daughter’s death.
She runs and ends up in Marissa’s room which leads to all sorts of emotions hitting her all at once. The room that was once a usual hangout spot for the two is now a shrine for Marissa, and it is gut-wrenching to witness Dre go through the pain of losing Marissa again.
While Dre is going through an emotional roller coaster, detective Greene of the Memphis Police Department has managed to connect all the murders across the country. She explains how she concluded to her subordinates and viewers, and the name NI’jah reappears.
Important revelations about Dre and her childhood get revealed throughout Greene’s investigation, which finally leads her to Houston. She meets up with people remotely and closely related to Dre and Marissa, trying to get as much information as she can on Dre, eventually confirming that she is convinced that Dre is, after all, the killer.
Throughout the last episodes, the show’s makers commented heavily on the reality of fan culture, how it turns so toxic for some people that they lose all sense of self, getting absorbed by it completely. The show’s last episode gifted its viewers with a black woman on the stage, given in completely to the obsession of her dead friend’s memories, getting arrested. It is an amazing experience finally watching a black woman that is not your token therapist or cop or the kind neighborhood auntie.
Dre has changed her identity and lives as a masculine woman named Tony. She finds love for herself in the form of Rashida, a girl from a healthy, rich, and accepting family. The two get intimate, and on a superficial level, Dre or Tony seems to be doing just fine. Things are almost looking up for her, but they are also not.
Rashida hates Ni’Jah, and Dre tends to kill people who hate her. She murders Rashida with her bare hands, which are twisted but emotional. She attends the Ni’Jah concert and finds herself on the stage somehow. She then finds herself in the car with her, hugging her thinking she has achieved it all. The show ends with Dre’s arrest for getting on the stage, but for her, the hallucinations are more than enough to make her happy in life.
Swarm Review
Right off the bat, actress Dominique Fishback must be applauded for how she expressed Dre’s grief converting into a murder spree. The minute emotions expressed during the murder to her creepily calm and collected while cleaning evidence and binge eating right next to the body. It is all so absurd, and she did it so right.
The night Dre decides to go to the club alone is the night her best friend Marissa gets murdered. The show wastes no time in speeding into things and launching its wild beast in the open. We directly get into Dre expressing her grief by killing all those involved in her murder or those who say anything against Ni’Jah, the one common thing both Dre and Marissa bonded over.
Unlike most shows, Swarm does not blame Dre’s childhood or any such traumatic event during that time for her present crimes. The show convinces us in the first few episodes that Dre’s love-turned-obsession with Ni’Jah pushes her to kill all those people. But when you focus on the underlying nuances, one realizes that Ni’jah is probably not even a part of the core problem.
She is nothing but the only thing that kept Marissa and Dre together and close. For Dre, murdering Ni’Jah’s haters was a task she thought she was doing in honor of Marissa because she was a fan too. The show, till the end, does not give many reasons as to why Dre acted out. She is portrayed more as a wild animal who does things because it is in their nature than a creature of reasoning and logic.
Real-life singer Beyonce very much inspires Ni’Jah’s existence, and the show’s name, Swarm, seems apt because of the latter’s fandom name, ‘Beehive.’ The show has sprinkled many references to the singer and her life.
During its emotionally straining moments or moments of high tension, the show plays a buzzing sound which adds to the overstimulation of thought vibes of the show. Donald Grover is a talented director who can be trusted for one thing no matter what, his ability to make every scene pleasing. The show has some of the most aesthetically pleasing scenes and backdrops.
Dre does not enjoy murdering people. Though she was way too comfortable during the cleaning process, she was never a serial killer.
Sure, she was obsessed with Ni’Jah more than she would like to admit, and yes, Marissa’s death pushed her off the edge, and yes, she ended up killing quite a bunch of people, but she was inherently a bad person. The way the show is, it makes you want to root for Fishback’s character.
The show does not try to justify Dre’s actions or even try to redeem her. There is only some mention of her slightly traumatic past but nothing too dramatic. The show is shot very objectively, and though it has quite a few emotional scenes, especially the ones with Dre in them, the makers still never lose the dark comedy approach to the show.
Ni’jah, as a star, maybe a background presence, but the fandom and the fandom culture take the front seat. The show discusses fan culture and how social media makes people delusional, leading to all kinds of crazy worldwide.
Dre’s motive behind whatever she did could be blamed on this obsessive behavior, her sudden loss of her friend, and the guilt of being at the club and ignoring her texts. At the same time, she was probably getting killed, but she never openly comments on what pushed her to indulge in such serial killer activities.
Our Verdict
Overall, Swarm is a great satirical commentary on how when loneliness gets combined with online fan culture, it leads to the parasocial interaction between fans and their idolized celebrities and a dead best friend leading to an utterly psychotic people-killing wild beast going on rampant on a murder spree. The show is a must-watch because of Dre’s character and killing tendencies, the black humor, underlying themes, great references to real-life incidents, and its almost perfect story.
To many, the last episode may feel disappointing because it was expected that the makers would dive deeper into Dre’s past or the intricacies of her mind. Still, the show did not indulge in leaving a way for her redemption, which, to be honest, works too because the number of people the woman killed in blind rage is not funny.
The show feels completely new and refreshing with how the makers decided to go with the story and use real-life happenings. Could idolizing a celebrity to the extent of having no social life lead one to become a literal bloodthirsty psychopath is unclear. Still, its perfectly timed humor, beautiful aesthetics, and Dre’s characterization make the show a must-watch.
Our Rating: ⭐ (4.1/5).
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