[REVIEW] Piggy
CW: Harassment and violence against women; anti-fat violence
Spoilers included.
Carlota Pereda’s Sundance hit Piggy releases this week to Alamo Drafthouse cinemas in the US and VOD. It has already garnered praise and awards from Brussels International Fantastic Film Fest, Fantastic Fest, and Strasbourg European Fantastic Film Fest and after viewing the film, it’s clear as to why.
Piggy follows in the vein of 2016’s Raw, not in plot so much as two coming of age horror films that are a little messed up and a lot covered in blood. Piggy is a story taking place in the Spanish country-side that focuses on Sara (Laura Galan), a teen who is consistently bullied for being fat. Sara’s family owns a butcher shop in town and three of Sara’s classmates come into the shop and take photos to post, mocking Sara and her lifestyle.
One day Sara is swimming in the local pool when the same classmates, including her ex-friend Claudia (Irene Ferreiro), brutally bully Sara and attempt to drown her before stealing her clothes and running away, leaving Sara to walk home in only her bikini. On the way home, Sara comes across a van where she sees her bullies in the back, covered in blood and begging for help. After much contemplation, the killer (Richard Holmes) driving the van opens his door to give Sara a towel before driving off with the girls. Sara keeps this incident to herself.
It is later reported by the local news that the lifeguard and waitress of the pool are missing, followed by the disappearance of the girls a few hours later. While the girls were working to drown Sara, none of them had noticed the dead lifeguard at the bottom of the pool, so though her parents continue to ask her about that day, she knows nothing. The remainder of the film follows Sara as she grapples with the struggles of adolescence, particularly the violence against her as a fat woman. Her mother tells her to only eat salad, everyone on the street harasses her, and her bullies coin her nickname and the title of the film: Piggy.
It turns out that the killer is intrigued by Sara and is going after the people trying to hurt her. She has an encounter with him in the woods, and at one point, the pair discover that they are attracted to one another, coming close to kissing. Sara later masturbates in her room, imagining this scene with the killer who is the only person in the film who treats her with any amount of kindness. In the end, she kills this man to escape him and save the girls from murder, and she sobs as soon as she realizes that he is dead.
Sara’s connection with the killer is what sells this film. What is a girl to do if the only person who sees you as a human being is also a serial killer terrorizing your town? What if the person killing was picking off the ones perpetuating violence? There were points where the film wanted me to root for Sara and her connection with the killer, though the morality of that thought process remains a sticky situation.
Though this point is central to the film’s thesis–though that thesis is more unclear than it is a point to continue to ponder– it does feel worthwhile to question the implications of a fat woman, who is already demonized by everyone around her, to find attraction to a murderer. This is one issue that feels ambiguous and perhaps complicates an otherwise extremely nuanced and weird look at being a teenage girl.
The performance from Galan is enchanting and really asks the audience to question their own perceptions of this young woman and grapple with the choices that she makes. Sara may not ever know what the right thing to do is–and perhaps neither do we.
Though the film could have been a bit more fleshed out, perhaps its rawness is what makes it what it ends up becoming. Piggy is a bold, defiant film of the horror genre that plays with emotions in a unique way. It forces the audience to consider how they would handle morally ambiguous situations, or perhaps push them to recognize that maybe they wouldn’t know what to do either.