🧨 Horror/Thriller 🇪🇸 Spain (2022)

"Your boyfriend's leaving. Oh, darling, you're all alone now. Come on! Let's catch the pig-whale."

What interests me about Piggy is why watching it feels safe. I think #TeamPiggy, right at the end of the credits, is the answer.

There is a point being made, and it comes with some plot armor. A safe narrative is frequently unfrightening. It doesn’t matter how much blood you drench the protagonist with to make the poster shot look gritty if the film itself is no more violent and no darker than a giallo. The question then is, if you’re not the type who will find this horror—it’s not for me; perhaps it will be for you—is this interesting as a thriller or a crime drama? Did this tell a good story? For me, absolutely yes, I enjoyed Piggy and found it worth watching, so let’s look at why.

There are two simplest structures for a story like Piggy where it’s obvious from the beginning it’s trying to make a social statement. You could embrace a bleak ending and make the point in a grim and uncomfortable way, or you can have a more obvious heroic arc for the protagonist. And Piggy makes it very obvious from the marketing material and the tone of the early film that Sara has substantial plot armor and that the author of her reality has her back.

This is the same exact problem with The Boy Behind the Door, but there, it’s worse to the degree that there are no stakes the entire film. A film needs stakes to function. On top of that, there is little meaningful emotional content and no interesting character development. To me, The Boy Behind the Door was just dead in the water doing nothing and then ending. It was never going to harm either boy, nor was it ever going to destroy them mentally. It was a friends-surviving-together-through-friendship film. So if that’s that, why watch? For everything else it could do. In The Boy Behind the Door, it had nothing else.

Piggy is so much different. It is continuously interesting, with quality characters, believable events (to a degree), emotional and interpersonal stakes, some moderate bloodiness, and an ending that was not entirely predetermined. Where it was certain The Boy Behind the Door wasn’t going to kill off both kids, Piggy had more teeth: substantial harm could have happened to almost anyone, and frequently bad events did occur. It was only with Sara herself and to a lesser degree her family and the less-bullying blonde girl that I felt sure confident the film was telegraphing physical safety.

The threat to Sara in this story is definitely meant to include physical risk—there are scenes in the middle of the film where the audience is meant to fear for her safety—but they just aren’t credible as threats to her. The first moment physical risk is introduced, one small action with a blanket tips off the rest of the film. But where the physical threat is low, the psychological risk for Sara is ridiculously high. The dynamics of her getting any help for anything in her life are complex.

Sara is living under continuous siege: her mother is a terror, constantly reacting to literally everything before thinking or listening. She is a chain of immediate overreactions to the entirety of her life. She will not listen for nuance, she will not look at what is happening in front of her, and when she notices something she doesn’t like, she tries to act supportive by aggressively doing random useless thngs like yelling at other parents or force-feeding her daughter a lettuce. While I know I should be compassionate and I can see she does care for Sara, I fundamentally detest her mother and find her to be the least sympathetic character in the film.

Sara’s father’s good to her, though a bit wife-cowed, and her brother… exists. Who cares about that one. But beside her father and her whatever brother, nobody else is genuinely supportive. She’s scared to speak to anyone even before the plot picks up. She’s bullied by her mom and aggressed by her peers, and their campaign of terror is working: she can’t defend herself from them emotionally or physically, and she can’t stop harming herself by looking at their mockery of her.

There is no space where she seems emotionally safe. The only positive interpersonal connection that develops for her until late in this film is an interesting romance subplot. I absolutely love that plot. I think it is optimistic and strangely sweet. And again, is this the film that’s going to take the bullied girl, break her completely, and leave? No, we are #TeamPiggy, and this is going to end, in some way, better for her than it started.

In this case, there was so much going on in the film, and so much that was more interesting than horror-style tension and violence, that I was constantly interested and engaged as a viewer. I think this was better than a straight horror film. It made more room for complexity and it was more psychologically interesting than I expected.

Sara has some challenging moments to go through and complex decisions to make, and watching her navigate this perilous moment is very satisfying and fun, although at times it’s hard to watch her mother’s abusive bullshit. So, while Piggy may be fundamentally unscary to anyone who isn’t easily shocked, it is also fascinating and a well-told story with memorable characters and a plausible ending,

I could have taken an edgier film, and I would have loved any of a range of endings, but I was very happy with this as well and I’m okay with the conclusion they chose. Piggy is certainly worth your time to watch it.

Recommended.

Some Lists:

🇪🇸 Spain
🧨 Horror/Thriller
2️⃣ 2020–2029 | 📆 2022
💎 Slightly Hidden Horror Gems and 🌱 Candidates
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