Pig – Film Review

We don’t get a lot of things to really care about.

Movie Details

Rating: B+

Director: Michael Sarnoski
Writer: Michael Sarnoski
Actors: Nicolas Cage, Alex Wolff, Adam Arkin, Nina Belforte, Gretchen Corbett, Dalene Young, Darius Pierce, Elijah Ungvary, Brian Sutherland, David Knell, Sean Tarjyoto, Tom Walton, Dana Millican, October Moore, Cassandra Violet, Julia Bray, Beth Harper, David Shaughnessy, Kevin-Michael Moore, Davis King, Cody Burns, Kieran Thomas, Parker Green, Kent W. Luttrell, Troy Oelke, Jovani Ridler, Bill Salfelder, Jamie Martin Stewart, Daniel Vasic, Christian Wilson
Runtime: 1 h 31 min
Release Date: July 16, 2021
Genres: Drama, Thriller
Certification: R

Living alone in the Oregon wilderness, a truffle hunter named Robin Feld (Nicolas Cage) returns to Portland to find the person who stole his beloved pig.

Out of all the things Nicolas Cage is known for as an actor, the thing that probably to most people’s minds first is the iconic freakout scene that he does in practically every movie he’s in. For the majority of the movie, his character is relatively normal (as normal as a Nicolas Cage movie character can be) until that one scene happens.

There are plenty of them whether it’s in Vampire’s Kiss, The Wicker Man, or even in Face/Off, Cage does it all the time, and audiences have come to expect one of those scenes in any movie he stars in and they love it. But there are some exceptions to that rule where he actually portrays a character not only well, but without a freakout scene. An example of this would be his nuanced and emotionally strong performance in Knowing.

And now, adding to that list is Pig – a movie that’s incredibly quiet and almost meditative that brings us one of the best performances in Cage’s entire career. His work here as Robin Feld is so thoughtful and subtle that, at times, it doesn’t even feel like a performance. Cage will take you on a rollercoaster of emotions with this character whose backstory is well-detailed throughout the course of the film while also being brilliantly mysterious when need be.

Movies like Pig don’t come around too often. It’s an incredibly simplistic film that quite literally only focuses on a man who sets out on a journey to find the people responsible for stealing his beloved pig. But writer/director Michael Sarnoski made the wise decision to not make Pig an over-the-top revenge movie. This easily could’ve been a film heavily reminiscent of John Wick – after all both movies follow a man angry over an animal – but Pig isn’t like that. There isn’t a scene in this movie that gets your blood pumping because of heavy action.

There’s no action in Pig but rather plenty of thoughtful lines of dialogue that tell you all you need to know. Robin doesn’t want to kill anybody and that’s made very clear in the movie. He simply wants to get his pig back and live his life again – simple as that. But of course, this is a movie and so finding the pig isn’t going to be as simple as looking around town. Robin has to go on a journey of self-discovery and relive past memories in Pig, making it a wonderful character drama more than anything.

Although this character-driven approach was much appreciated, it did feel like there was a punch missing in this movie. There’s really no sense of tension or urgency in this script which I feel would’ve made the movie a little bit better. But even still, the story that we did end up getting at the end of the day is one that I did appreciate.

And honestly, Pig is one of those movies that just doesn’t get made anymore which is genuinely sad to think about. We live in a day and age where almost every new release movie is either a superhero film, a sequel, or a reboot of some popular IP. We do get original films sometimes, but they almost always get buried due to the other more popular movies out the same weekend.

It’s sad that movies like Space Jam: A New Legacy make millions at the box office whereas Pig will undoubtedly struggle to make even a quarter of what Space Jam managed to rake in. Pig reminds me of a film that would have been released either in the late 90s or 2000s, and I love that about it. It’s not a perfect movie – sometimes the story doesn’t feel as captivating as it should and it’s sort of too simplistic in its execution – but it’s a movie that I can deeply appreciate and respect. Original films do exist, we just have to go out and support them.