Mark Reviews Movies: PIGGY

Piggy, Magnet Releasing

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 6, 2022

Continuous cruelty begets a single, deciding moment of apathy or indirect vengeance in the devious setup to Piggy. Writer/director Carlota Pereda's thriller challenges our capacity for sympathy by making a group of tormentors into victims and the victim of that abuse into a silent accomplice of sorts to the anguish of her tormentors. This is a pretty daring foray into a moral vacuum, but it becomes increasingly obvious that the filmmaker has some hesitations about taking that examination all the way and/or some uncertainty about how to resolve the conflict she has established.

The first act, though, is quite something (It's little surprise to learn that the movie is an expansion of a short Pereda previously made—one that basically ends with the inciting incident of this feature adaptation). We meet Sara (Laura Galán), the quiet and shy daughter of a kind but meek butcher of a father (played by Julián Valcárcel) and an overbearing mother (played by Carmen Machi).

Sara is overweight, and that makes her the target of real-world and online bullying and harassment by her peers. While Sara watches a group of them hang out outside the family shop's window, ringleader Maca (Claudia Salas) stares at her with derision and makes a purging gesture toward Sara. Soon, Roci (Camille Aguilar) and Claudia (Irene Ferreiro), who apparently used to be friends with Sara and still acts in a friendly but stilted manner toward her, enter the shop. Roci sneaks a picture of Sara with her parents, posting it to social media with a caption: "Three Little Piggies."

Her torment continues unabated, even when Sara goes out of her way to avoid it. The posts and comments continue online. She keeps track of her bullies, not only as the kind of self-flagellation that social media all but encourages, but also to evade contact with them. Wanting a break from working at the shop and her homework, Sara decides to take a walk to the town's public pool, where Claudia and her new friends, including boyfriend Pedro (José Pastor) were earlier.

Ensuring that no one is around, Sara gets into a bikini, puts her feet in the pool, and is startled by two things: a stranger—the Stranger (Richard Holmes) as we'll come to identify him—who had been underwater and the trio of teenage girls who have made her life one of misery and fear. Maca and Roci grab Sara, nearly drowning her, with a pool skimmer, despite Claudia's meager protests, and then, they take her things, leaving her to walk home in her swimsuit.

Until this point, Pereda makes Sara's experiences feel degrading and inescapable, while making it clear—as a headless corpse will do—that something sinister is going on well beyond the pain of a teenage girl. It all collides, though, when Sara, taking a dirt path to avoid being seeing on the main road, comes upon a truck. It belongs to the Stranger, and as he drives past her, Sara spots a hand reaching toward the rear window. The Stranger stops and drops a towel for her, and the two reach an unspoken agreement to let each other be. After all, the bloody hand, reaching out for help, belongs to Maca.

There's a lot to this early description, but it's important to understand how thoroughly Pereda defines and connects us to Sara's experiences—all of which leads her to making a choice that, while clearly wrong from an objective perspective, makes complete sense from a subjective one. It leaves us with a feeling of moral disorientation, and the rest of the movie—until the equally confounding and straightforward third act—depends on that mindset, as Sara wrestles with both the fear of her inaction being discovered, either by her nosy mother or a father-son pair of cops (played by Chema del Barco and Fernando Delgado-Hierro), and the guilt of what she did and didn't do.

The game here, then, is one of deception, as Sara tries to cover up her awareness of the abductions and/or find her bullies, and of moral ambiguity. It works for a while, because Pereda finds some clever, as well as occasionally diabolical (such as when Sara has to dodge worried parents looking for their missing children in the forest), ways to escalate the stakes of Sara's scheme and because the filmmaker embraces the character's doubts, as well as our own doubts about her behavior. One of the trickier elements here is that, since Sara is so reserved, we're never quite certain if the guilt is on account of the Stranger being a serial killer or because she might think those bullies deserve what's coming to them.

The narrative issues, though, become just as plain as the movie's morality is fuzzy. First, there's the awkward connection that develops within the story and thematically between Sara and the Stranger, who is stalking her—but for reasons that suggest a kinship, at least in his mind, of some kind.

Mostly, though, Piggy doesn't live up to its initial promise, simply on account of a third act that puts aside its thornier examination of the limits of sympathy in favor of a generic cat-and-mouse game in a dungeon of horrors. A story as bold and thought-provoking as this deserves much more than such a simplistic climax and resolution, but unfortunately, Pereda fumbles that.

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