Swoon

Swoon is writer/director Tom Kalin's debut feature film. Tagged the picture that "put the Homo back into Homocide", it tells the story of the infamous 1923 Leopold-Loeb murder case. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb (Craig Chester, Daniel Schlachet) were two young, Nietzschean influenced, intellectually arrogant Jewish students who were very much in love with each other. They cemented their sexually charged relationship by committing various crimes together. One day, however, they kidnapped a 14 year-old boy, and this is where there eventual downfall began. Loeb ruthlessly killed the boy. The pair then calmly put the body in some marshland, certain they could never be captured. The police were not, however, quite so sure.

A meticulously researched piece of work, Swoon is a markedly different kind of film from the two previous ones based on the controversial murder case, Hitchcock's Rope and Richard Fleischer's Compulsion. Shot in sharp monochrome, the film unashamedly puts the sexual element of the story right to the fore. The result is a gripping film, replete with anachronistic details designed to impress upon the viewer the prevailing relevance of the story to today's society. All in all, it is a challenging impressive piece of work which definitely deserves to find an audience.

Review by Stephen Townsend
Taken from EUFS Programme 1993-94