Synopsis: a psycho and his retarded, pregnant sister abduct, torture, kill, and eat people for kicks.
Pig has quite rightly received kudos for it's bravura improvisational performances, its no-holds barred extreme content, and director Adam Mason's bold approach (which must have required meticulous planning and impeccable timing, particularly for what must surely be the longest single shot in cinema history); however, alongside this praise, criticism has also been levelled at the film for being a laborious, drawn out and ultimately pointless project devoid of a plot.
Not really fair, says I....
Admittedly, for most of the running time, Pig appears to be nothing more than a catalogue of gut-wrenching atrocities—rape, murder, torture, dismemberment, and cannibalism—all shown in unflinching detail for the delectation of its gore-hungry audience, and it is true that matters become rather tedious at times, but Mason has a trick up his sleeve: a sucker-punch of an ending that made me re-assess all that had gone before...
Having given it some thought, I now believe the film to be a well executed metaphor for the whole extreme horror movie experience, with Andrew Howard's psycho nut-job representing the viewer, who happily wallows in violence and absolute depravity for an hour and a half before casually assuming a more socially acceptable persona and returning to the normality of everyday life. Mason is holding up a mirror to his audience and revealing to us the dark side of our very own nature—the deviant part of our psyche that, like the film's killer (well, maybe not EXACTLY like the killer), we may even keep hidden from our nearest and dearest.
Pig has quite rightly received kudos for it's bravura improvisational performances, its no-holds barred extreme content, and director Adam Mason's bold approach (which must have required meticulous planning and impeccable timing, particularly for what must surely be the longest single shot in cinema history); however, alongside this praise, criticism has also been levelled at the film for being a laborious, drawn out and ultimately pointless project devoid of a plot.
Not really fair, says I....
Admittedly, for most of the running time, Pig appears to be nothing more than a catalogue of gut-wrenching atrocities—rape, murder, torture, dismemberment, and cannibalism—all shown in unflinching detail for the delectation of its gore-hungry audience, and it is true that matters become rather tedious at times, but Mason has a trick up his sleeve: a sucker-punch of an ending that made me re-assess all that had gone before...
Having given it some thought, I now believe the film to be a well executed metaphor for the whole extreme horror movie experience, with Andrew Howard's psycho nut-job representing the viewer, who happily wallows in violence and absolute depravity for an hour and a half before casually assuming a more socially acceptable persona and returning to the normality of everyday life. Mason is holding up a mirror to his audience and revealing to us the dark side of our very own nature—the deviant part of our psyche that, like the film's killer (well, maybe not EXACTLY like the killer), we may even keep hidden from our nearest and dearest.