Reviewed On: 10/06/2010 By
Hellbound Heart
It's straight in with a gut-punch of visceral nastiness with
Pig, the latest film from British director
Adam Mason (Broken, The Devil's Chair, Blood River). A woman, terrified and covered in blood, flees along a deserted highway - where's she's intercepted by a man we'll come to know only as "Daddy" (Andrew Howard). When she hears his car engine, she gives up trying to run, standing, stunned, as if awaiting the inevitable. Daddy gets out and comforts her, before repeatedly bludgeoning her into unconsciousness and returning her to the "family home", a sprawling compound replete with other people locked in enclosures or chained to the ground.
You know what you're going to get from the outset here - this is an in-your-face exploitation flick with the nastiness levels ramped up for us jaded 21st century audiences. When Daddy and the woman get back, he promptly murders her and then starts hacking her up, at one point shoving her bodily organs into the face of a second woman who is chained up nearby, and using some of her remains to prepare a spot of cannibal cuisine. In one of the enclosures there's a (heavily pregnant, mentally deficient) woman usually just referred to as "Sweetheart": she may at one point have been a regular captive who has succumbed to Daddy's malevolent will - in any case, when he lets her out, she's happy to assist him in tormenting the others. This takes the form of releasing, and then shooting at a man, pelting his dying body with rocks and stabbing him with a screwdriver - then returning him to the compound, battering his head into a pulp and then spitting some of his cranial remains into the face of the chained woman, who we can infer is the man's partner.
And why? - If you are expecting plot exposition here, then forget it.
Pig is an exercise in pure brutality, as nonsensical and unjustified as pure brutality often is. The only initial clue you get as to what Daddy is doing relates to his insistence on referring to himself as Daddy and to his victims as "brothers" and "sisters" - there's some sort of warped family dynamic going on here, as with one of Mason's other films Broken, which also featured a maniacal individual trying to create an artificial family unit for himself.
The lead actor - frequent Mason collaborator and screenplay-writer Andrew Howard - is just one of my favourite genre actors working today. He exudes unstable menace brilliantly and has immense screen presence: in fact, without his input, Mason's films just wouldn't be what they are. He's interesting - and frightening - to watch here, a believably-warped individual whose physically-overbearing manner (frequently hugging, clinging, leaning and grabbing) is always on the verge of spilling over into sadistic violence.
Pig is shot on a hand-held camera which is used to good effect, never idly spinning out of control as with so many films which use this style; it often feels as though you are getting too close for comfort to the action, like a bystander who is about to be implicated. Technically, this is a very clever film, filmed largely as one continuous take it seems, and the camera frequently moves in closer and backs away, sometimes seeming to avert its gaze from the worst of Daddy's excesses. The coloration here is pure 70s grindhouse, too, which adds to the exploitation flavour of the film as a whole. An atmospheric overlay of music, interspersed with diatribes pouring from a radio, works well.
On top of all this, Pig concludes with a genuinely daring and intriguing ending, which adds a different flavour to the events just witnessed. I wouldn’t spoil it for you, but make no mistake - the ending is far from a cop-out. Filmed over the course of a spare weekend in Cambridgeshire, UK (!) rather than in the Deep South as it appears,
Pig is a novel, nasty film and some slight flagging in the middle of the film (inevitable, really, when the entire thing's one take) does nothing overall to detract from its impact.
