Something to watch tonight: Friday 27 September

Pig (Sarnoski, 2021)

I’ve been wanting to recommend this film for quite a few weeks now but was put off when my colleague at Stuff, Graeme Tuckett, recommended it in his Sunday Star-Times column back in July.

I want these newsletters to feel organic and original, even though Graeme and I have similar enough tastes that we are likely to coincide every now and then. He recommended the Paul Simon documentary last weekend, several days after I did here and I’m sure that’s just a quality coincidence.

(By the way, checking the date of his Pig recommendation meant me putting the phrase “Stuff Graeme Tuckett Pig” into Google which is as good an argument for working from home where no one can see what you are typing as I can think of.)

Anyway, Graeme’s piece is a good read, as he usually is, but when I saw that Pig had just landed as a free stream at Māori+ I knew I needed to recommend it here (and share some of my At the Movies review from August 2021):

Nicolas Cage is Rob, a backwoodsman living in a remote cabin. At first thought you think this is a period piece like First Cow but then a bright yellow Camaro noisily turns up with a box of groceries. It’s driven by Amir, Alex Wolff, a supplier of high end ingredients to top Portland restaurants.

Rob is a truffle hunter, and his secret is a pig who, apart from being the recipient of all his training, also happens to be Rob’s best and only friend. Not long after, the pig is, how do I put this, pig-napped in a daring late night raid which leaves Rob badly beaten but determined to get him back.

Truffles, of course, are a rare and highly sought after ingredient and the high prices they can fetch make any advantage a hunter can get a lucrative one. The truffle hunters of Oregon are evidently protective of their turf and their methods and, like so many businesses where high rollers like to splash cash around, organised crime is not far behind.

So, Pig is a chase film, as Cage’s character with his long suffering driver Amir, searching across Portland for clues to the pig’s whereabouts. But, after a Fight Club-esque scene where I really thought I was going to lose my sympathies for the film, it turns into a meditation on something else entirely – grief and the way that can devour your present at the same time as it strips you of your past.

As we go, we realise that all of the central characters – maybe not the pig itself – are defined by the loss of a loved one too early, that sense of incompleteness, of whakamā at being left behind, of not doing enough, the retreat from or the rejection of society.

The script isn’t online at RNZ, you’ll have to listen to the whole segment for the rest.

Writer-director Sarnoski, of course, also made the new prequel to A Quiet Place (A Quiet Place: Day One) which is also about a damaged person on a dangerous quest with a beloved animal at its heart.

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Where to watch Pig

Aotearoa: Streaming on Netflix or Māori+ (free with ads). It’s also still available on Blu-ray from Madman.

Australia: Streaming on Netflix

Canada, Ireland and UK: Digital rental

USA: Streaming on Hulu

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Further listening

Tonight at about 9.40 on RNZ Nights with Emile Donovan, I’ll be talking about Megalopolis and the career of Francis Ford Coppola. Do join us.