Piggy Review: Carlota Pereda’s Deviously Clever Exploration of Human Cruelty

With Piggy, writer-director Carlota Pereda announces herself as a skilled manipulator of audience sympathies. With a novelist’s eye for detail, she takes us through the everyday life of Sara, a quiet teenager in a small Spanish village who’s constantly ridiculed for her weight. When Sara arrives at the local pool with a towel wrapped around her, we’re acutely aware of her discomfort and exposure—that she’s taken care to show up at an hour with the fewest patrons. In fact, the only other swimmer in sight is a beefy stranger (Richard Holmes).

Unfortunately, the clique of popular girls who so often torment Sara are passing by, and on this day they go further than usual in harassing her, stealing her belongings so that she has nothing but her bikini. On the long, humiliating walk home, Sara happens upon the film’s provocative centerpiece: a van driven by the imposing stranger from the pool, with her bullies locked in the back. As they scream for help, the stranger wordlessly offers Sara the clothes that were stolen from her. She accepts, and he drives away with the girls, exemplifying Piggy’s darkest humor, as the only person to treat Sara with humanity is a man she later learns is a serial killer.

This is also more or less where Pereda’s 2018 short film of the same name leaves off, though the scenes that continue this story, stretching it to feature-length, are quite a bit shakier than the earlier ones that depict Sara’s daily routines. Piggy’s middle stretch, which involves a lot of people wandering around in the dark, is a slog, feeling emptier and more time-killing than fraught with tension. Things do pick up again before a tense climax, though it largely opts to keep the audience guessing rather than following the events to an even bolder conclusion.

But Piggy remains impressive for its empathetic portraiture. Sara’s social interactions feel distressingly true, grounding an otherwise heightened premise: What if a violent stranger’s intervention allowed you to comfortably actualize your rage? As a character, Sara isn’t much of an active participant in the events of the film. She’s the sort of person who keeps her head down, having given up complaining that her work in the family butcher shop leaves her smelling like meat. She tends to let her overbearing mother (Carmen Machi) speak for her, and she never calls out the one particular bully (Irene Ferreiro) who used to be her friend.

Piggy gets us to feel how Sara lives beneath a suffocating cloud of being constantly gawked at and judged. It concocts a story that turns on her withdrawn, beaten-down nature: By refusing to intervene or otherwise call for help when she witnesses the kidnapping, she essentially turns that passivity into a bitter and momentary weapon. If Piggy struggles a bit with where to go from there, it never totally dulls its undercurrent of devious cleverness.