AllMovie

Barbara Hanlo adapted her hour-long experimental feature The Swamp from a short story by the Dutch belletrist A. Alberts. In the original tale - heavily laden with allegorical meaning - an eccentric withdraws to a house situated behind a swamp. In Hanlo's version, a traveler learns of these events and attempts to locate the milieux; finding the swamp is a relatively facile task, though questions linger about whether this swamp is the same one described by Alberts. Located in the Danube Delta of Romania, the swamp depicted in the film suggests an otherworldly, almost nightmarish menace, and radiates an oppressive bleakness. The house found by the traveler, it turns out, is located on an island and once belonged to the exiled dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu. The traveler enters this house, where he is overcome by ghostly visions of the events that transpire in Alberts's story and seems to actually become a character in the dream of another; enigmatic, possibly unanswerable questions begin to abound, such as why the man persists in hiding and sets the table in the house for three people. Over the course of the narrative, swamp itself begins to symbolize and embody the nexus between pure reality and pure illusion, and each strange event that transpires onscreen opens itself up to countless interpretations and readings.