Laura Galán appears in PIGGY by Carlota Pereda, an official selection of the Midnight section at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Jorge Fuembuena.
I recently wrote a review of Speak No Evil, a Danish horror film that premiered at Sundance. I criticized the movie for failing to advance beyond the expectations of great horror in today’s era. After watching another Sundance horror film, Piggy, I realize that perhaps I was a bit too harsh.
Piggy follows a teenage butcher’s daughter named Sara whose peers frequently bully her for her weight. When a sketchy-looking man targets her bullies, Sara must decide how much of what she knows to tell and to which people.
I think my biggest issue with the film is that none of its characters are remotely sympathetic or likable. It’s clear that in the beginning, the only string of likability or intrigue attached to the protagonist is her victimhood. Perhaps this is a device to draw attention to how we treat overweight people in the media, but it gets lost in how generally unsettling Sara is – she gnaws on her hair, refuses to speak or engage with anyone besides herself, and constantly looks angry at the world. Even if that still is the point, it’s difficult to get into the movie when there are no likable characters that aren’t funny or interesting.
The bullying she is subject to seems overly cruel and perhaps unrealistic. One of the girls takes a picture of Sara and her parents at the butcher shop and posts it on Instagram, captioning it something along the lines of “Three Little Piggies.” When Sara goes to the local pool to swim in private, her bullies find her, trap her in a net, and threaten to drown her. While this level of cruelty may have been accurate to the bullies of a few decades ago, it doesn’t ring true to the behaviors of today’s teenagers. Especially for the film’s dependence on social media as a vehicle for cyberbullying, the level of the bullies’ malice seems too extreme to be realistic, and they are given no motivations to act in the way they do. It’s just overly extreme bullying for no reason, and coupled with the general unlikability of the protagonist, the film never becomes fully coherent.
The film also never breaks from the generic codes of slasher horrors. A monstrous man propelled by psychosexual fury abuses sexually active and traditionally “popular” young women only to be thwarted in the third act in an escape sequence. It’s a formula established by Psycho way back in 1960 and solidified by Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Piggy operates the same way, but it seems to focus on the trope of the so-called final girl: the young woman who is recognizably different from the others who is the lone survivor of the monster after a third-act fight/escape. Piggy seems to want to subvert the trope by implicating its protagonist and final girl into the crimes of the male killer. However, what results is little more than a standard revenge plot. The third act escape sequence feels a lengthened stay in Buffalo Bill’s basement from The Silence of The Lambs, and is perhaps over-stuffed with disturbing imagery of confinement. The implications surrounding bodily control are questionable, especially if the director is attempting to draw a parallel between the bullies and their victim.
Though it thankfully doesn’t end in a triumphant “good for her” moment, and the final moments of the film were my favorites, I didn’t feel that the movie actually did or said anything interesting. For something that so concretely stuck to the tropes and formulas of decades old generic slasher films, I think it needed to be at least a bit more entertaining or subversive to be successful. It seems to simultaneously lean hard into genre while attempting to be unique, and what results seems to be a desperate attempt at legitimate modern horror.
I acknowledge, in the context of my Speak No Evil review, that I am being extremely picky with my horror film consumption. Movies are an inherently subjective experience, and I’ve come to realize that my horror preferences deal in extremes: artistic expressions of cultural critique like Get Out or Midsommar and extremely generic but self-aware blockbusters like Jennifer’s Body. For me, Piggy found itself straddling those two extremes but not committing to either side.
In sum, Piggy recognizes that there is harmful treatment of overweight people. In order to criticize that treatment, it relies on unrealistic representations of bullying that undermine its message and generic tropes that reinforce sexist subtexts and connect protagonist with monster. It’s not a bad movie at surface level, but it gets worse the more I think about it. For horror fans looking to this year’s Sundance, there are unfortunately much better options than Piggy.
Piggy had its World Premiere in the Midnight section of Sundance Film Festival 2022.
Director: Carlota Pereda
Writer: Carlota Pereda
Rated: NR
Runtime: 90m
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
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Emmy is a big fan of all things TV and movies. Among her current favorites are The Matrix, Midsommar, Titane, and Fleabag. Catch her on Letterboxd @ewenstrup !
