You might think you can guess why a pig would be so important to a man but you might be wrong. 2021's Pig has certainly surprised a lot of people who assumed it would be a different kind of film than it is. This is largely due to intentional misdirection in the marketing campaign and within the film itself--leading to a couple aspects of the story not making sense on reflection. But on the whole, it's a nice, melancholy rumination on how amoral business practices bleed into corrupting an artform and the well-being of the artists. And it's lovely to see Nicholas Cage disappear into a role.
As we watch him stalk the streets of Portland, in pursuit of his stolen pig, he's not conspicuously Nicolas Cage, he's a man named Robin Feld. A hermit we meet living alone in the gorgeous woods of Oregon with his truffle pig, now forced to make contact with the human world again.
Director Michael Sarnoski sure makes the woods look beautiful and dark. His shots of the city are less interesting, coming off as an imitation of Nicolas Winding Refn with their excessive use of neon. But it's nice just to watch a movie with such an easy, contemplative pace in which the filmmakers aren't constantly trying to find ways to feed you exposition.
Ultimately, the film is a rumination on the state of artistic expression in the modern media which is now dominated by twin forces of soullessness--corporate cowardice and deconstructionist academic theory. Don't watch the movie expecting a revenge fantasy because Robin finds a much more powerful, more eloquent way to respond to what was done to him.
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