Pig

Directed by Michael Sarnoski

Running time: 1hr32 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY

Brandy and Nicolas Cage star in Pig

Escaping to a log cabin to live the simple life is a fairly common fantasy. I know this, because it’s something I think about often, and when I brought it up with my therapist he delicately implied I’m far from unique in this regard. That poor man, paid to endure dozens of impractical log cabin escape fantasies from well-off urbanites!

Anyway, Pig stars a grizzled and melancholy Nicolas Cage as Robin Feld, a man who has run away from both success and grief in urban Portland, preferring to live in tune with nature’s slow rhythms, hunting for truffles in the Oregon forests with his beautiful pig. He makes his living selling the truffles to his antithesis, a rich, needy twenty-something — think Mad Men’s Pete Campbell — played with relish by Alex Wolff. 

The pig really is beautiful; a purebred Kunekune with auburn hair and expressive eyes (kunekune means ‘fat and round’ in Māori, pleasingly). When she is pignapped, Robin’s equilibrium is destroyed, setting in motion the quest narrative of this pleasing debut from director Michael Sarnoski. I was reminded of Herman Melville’s short stories (present and correct: an implacable oddball hero, versions of masculinity in conflict, and the possibly vain pursuit of purity in a corrupted world) — but that’s not to imply this film is overly wordy or literary. If anything it’s a film concerned with image, a theme deliciously crystallised in my favourite scene, one stolen from under Cage’s very nose by character actor David Knell, who gives us a phony chef I would watch a full film about, in maybe five minutes of screen time. Bon appétit.

PIG (2021) Written by Vanessa Block, Michael Sarnoski | Shot by Patrick Scola | Edited by Brett W. Bachman

In cinemas now.