Grade: A-
Nicolas Cage is the star of two of my favorite movies – Bringing Out the Dead and The Weather Man. I don’t think there’s an actor alive who plays a brooding, intense, tortured, tormented soul better. The projects he chooses are almost consistently interesting. Pig, his latest one, is an unpredictable rollercoaster; a smorgasbord of genres and influences. After the straightforward first act, you think you know where it’s going. You’ll be right and wrong. It reminded me of how I felt the first time I watched Parasite.
Cage, looking like his Con Air character 24 years later with a pot belly, plays Robin, a hermit living in a small shack in the woods on the outskirts of Portland, OR. His pig is a master at finding the best truffles, which Robin sells to a young man from the city named Amir. Amir visits once a week to collect the truffles and pay Robin, sometimes also bringing a care package of food/etc. One night, the pig is kidnapped, and Robin embarks on a bloody journey of revenge against the criminals who took his best friend and source of income.
That is as much plot as I’ll give you, because you’ll want to go into Pig fairly cold, as I’m glad I did. Writer/director Michael Sarnoski makes his feature film debut with Pig, which has an easy-to-digest running time of 92 minutes, but is filled to the brim with substance in an exhilarating, rarely boring journey. Just when it starts to lag a tiny bit, in comes a new development or tangent that keeps things interesting. There is an incredible scene at an upscale restaurant, that involves a chef. I won’t say what characters are there, or why, but it is astonishing to watch, and provides a perfect balance of humor with unsettling tones. Pig made me think the most of Quentin Tarantino and David Lynch, with tangents and dalliances into Eyes Wide Shut and Fight Club territory, and another unexpected type of film that I’ll leave you to discover. When he thinks he has found out where the pig has been taken to, we expect a bombastic blood-soaked climax. Instead what we get is one of the quietest parts of the movie.
Cage does some nice understated work here. 23-year-old actor Alex Wolff (the son in Hereditary) impressively and confidently holds his own with Cage, and all the screen time they share. Alan Arkin’s son Adam Arkin finds just the right memorable notes as a character we are told you don’t want to make mad. The ending features a gorgeous acoustic capo-less fingerpicked rendition of a song I am very familiar with. Pig is a masterful fusion of eclectic influences, and a cinematic gift that keeps you guessing.
Grade: A-
Film Reviews by Mark 
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