Concept: Vampire locusts—a French woman with a struggling locust farm discovers that feeding these insects blood makes them prosper.

• An effective thriller with horror elements, centered on the dysfunctional family of a single-mom succumbing to desperation and obsession as she tries to make her startup business work for her and her family.
• The queasiest scenes are actually the close-ups of the locusts; they are quite ugly creatures, in my opinion.
• Also impressive are scenes with hundreds of real locusts all together and their interactions with people. Later scenes with the CGI-produced flying swarm are impressive but don’t have the same kick.
• The story and characters involved with this woman fighting to make this weird, challenging business survive and the implications on her family are what hold up the story and make it work.
• Viewed on an Optoma HD28DSE projector, 92” screen, Netflix on Roku 3. Lots of dark scenes, which my projector doesn’t like too much. Sub-$1,000 projectors such as mine tend to struggle with black levels and contrast in dark scenes. Some like mine have a Dynamic Black feature that tries to lower the light output when the scene is dark and in that way increases the blacks, but it produces immediate variations that are so distracting that I just keep that feature off.
• Not for kids.

The Swarm (2021) 70%