pig movie review ebert

When Mani Haghighi ’s acerbic black comedy “Pig” opens, the camera wheels down a Tehran street following four teenage girls who are babbling to each other while simultaneously checking Instagram on their phones. Their conversation mainly concerns the recent split-up of a celebrity couple. The scene could be taking place anywhere in the world except that, this being Iran, the girls all wear hijabs along with their brightly colored knapsacks. Their happy chatter abruptly ends when a man rushes past them and they turn to see a horrified crowd staring at something in a curbside gutter – a man’s severed head.

The head, in a particularly droll touch, is that of Haghighi, the writer-director of “Pig.” In the film’s central conceit, a murderer is stalking and decapitating Iran’s famous filmmakers, and leaving their heads with the word “pig” (in Farsi) carved in their foreheads. Haghighi, we learn, is the fourth victim (the previous three are named; they are all real directors who are still very much alive). This wacky premise allows Haghighi to do something that other artists must envy: he gets to stage his own funeral (or at least his head’s; the body is never found), complete with maudlin, hypocritical eulogies.

One not-at-all-bereaved mourner at this baleful gathering of the cream of Tehran’s film scene is the movie’s protagonist, Hasan Kasmai (Hasan Majuni), a director who has been blacklisted for two years. The authorities reject any feature he proposes, so he’s reduced to the indignity of directing TV commercials for a bug spray, complete with dancing women dressed up as insects who spit up fake vomit when the gas hits them. When we first see Hasan, before he goes to the morgue to identify Haghighi’s head, he’s in an orange AC/DC t-shirt storming through a trendy Tehran art gallery, where he tells a New York Times reporter (played by the Times’ Thomas Erdbrink) that the decapitations are owed to the fact that “They simply hate us!” But Hasan must also face the additional indignity that the killers perhaps haven’t come after him because they don’t consider him important enough.

If “Pig” doesn’t sound like the kind of Iranian film U.S. art house crowds have seen in the past – well, it is and it isn’t. In 1990, Abbas Kiarostami ’s “Close-Up,” about a poor man arrested for impersonating a famous film director, established self-reflexive films-about-filmmakers as a distinctive Iranian subgenre, one often used to interrogate various aspects of Iranian society. In a sense, “Pig” belongs firmly in that tradition. Yet it is also something decidedly novel: a wildly original art-house comedy .

In attending Iran’s Fajr Film Festival the last two years, I was struck by the spirit of renewed artistic vitality I saw in the Iranian films there. That impression inspired me to co-found (with distributor Armin Miladi) the Iranian Film Festival New York, which had its first edition at the IFC Center last month. “Pig,” along with Bahman Farmanara’s “I Want to Dance” and Kamal Tabrizi’s “Sly,” were films in our lineup that exemplify the recent trend toward edgy comedy in Iranian cinema. All three inveigh against various forms of repression in Iran, and all push censorship boundaries in ways that would have been scarcely imaginable a few years ago. (In the case of “Pig,” I still can’t fathom how Haghighi got away with Hasan’s Busby Berkeley-like bug spray spot, since dancing females have long been one of the censors’ big no-nos.)

In a sense, “Pig” is like a double helix that intertwines the personal and the political. The personal side encompasses relationship quandaries that that wouldn’t look out of place in a Woody Allen comedy. Hasan’s blacklisting is giving him problems with his longtime mistress and leading lady Shiva (glamorous, heavily made-up Leila Hatami ), who’s contemplating acting in a film by Hasan’s unctuous rival Sohrab Saidi (excellent Ali Mosaffa ). Meanwhile, his wife ( Leili Rashidi ) and a daughter who acts as his assistant (Ainaz Azarhoush) don’t try to rein in his excesses and infidelities as much as shielding him from the various tempests his volatile nature generates. He also must contend with a social media stalker ( Parinaz Izadyar ), who adores his movies so much she worms her way into his bug-spray chorus line, and an increasingly senile mom (hilarious Mina Jafarzadeh) who’s given to wielding an antique rifle.

The political threads woven into this tapestry, meanwhile, are many and subtle, indicating the widespread but often opaque ways Iran exercises control over its citizens and artists. Though these are details, it’s significant that Hasan doesn’t know what he did to get blacklisted or when the ban will be lifted. The state’s ways are decisive and thorough but mysterious. And if the device of the beheadings strikes foreigners as outlandishly comical, it’s sure to be chilling to Iranians in recalling the “chain murders” of the late ‘90s, when a number of prominent dissidents and cultural figures were brutally murdered by shadowy security operatives (crimes that were dramatized in Mohammad Rasoulof ’s “Manuscripts Don’t Burn”).

But the film’s indictment isn’t simply aimed at individual officials or their lethal accomplices. When Hasan says, “They hate us,” he’s indicating a yawning cultural chasm. On one side are the hated: artists, intellectuals and free-thinkers. On the other side are the haters: not only hardliners and their allies in the regime, but also the part of the population that’s intolerant enough to go along with any vindictive persecution of their supposed enemies. In this sense, “Pig” is going after an entire cultural dynamic, one in which art and repression are inextricably opposed.

In 2006, Haghighi and Asghar Farhadi co-wrote the latter’s “ Fireworks Wednesday ,” the film that, more than any other, arguably inaugurated the current era of Iranian filmmaking. Setting aside the model of contemplative, de-dramatized cinema using non-actors and impoverished or rural settings that filmmakers like Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf employed in the 1990s, the new model used movie stars in intricate, plot-driven tales about middle-class urbanites. The approach has taken Farhadi to the Oscars twice in the last decade. And it’s one that Haghighi has now shifted from dramatic to comedic purposes, while maintaining a strong undertow of pointed, purposeful social criticism. The filmmaker and his work deserve to be better known, and “Pig” is an ideal introduction to both for American audiences.

Godfrey Cheshire

Godfrey Cheshire is a film critic, journalist and filmmaker based in New York City. He has written for The New York Times, Variety, Film Comment, The Village Voice, Interview, Cineaste and other publications.

• Hasan Ma’juni as Hasan Kasmai - The Director
• Aynaz Azarhoosh as Alma - The Daughter
• Leila Hatami as Shiva Mohajer - The Actress
• Leili Rashidi as Goli - The Wife
• Ali Bagheri as Azemat - The Policeman
• Mina Jafarzade as Jeyran - The Mother
• Parinaz Izadyar as Annie - The Stalker
• Siyamak Ansari as Homayoun - The Tennis Partner
• Ali Mosaffa as Sohrab Saidi - The Rival

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• Mahmoud Kalari
• Mani Haghighi
• Meysam Molaei

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Nicolas cage in ‘pig’: film review.

The actor stars in Michael Sarnoski’s Oregon-set debut feature about an off-the-grid truffle hunter who returns to the city in search of his kidnapped foraging pig.

By Sheri Linden

Sheri Linden

Senior Copy Editor/Film Critic

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Like every creative business, the world of fine dining is a mélange of art and commerce, love and ambition. For Rob, the profoundly scruffy hermit at the center of Pig , it’s a cutthroat industry that he put in the rearview mirror 15 years ago. Subsisting as a hunter of prized truffles in the backwoods of Oregon, he hasn’t entirely severed the cord to Portland’s high-end restaurant scene. But when it comes to human interaction and enterprise, everything about him says “I don’t give a damn” — until someone steals his adored truffle-hunting pig, and, like the world’s scraggliest action hero, he sets out to find her.

There’s an undeniable WTF factor to the idea of Nicolas Cage , American movies’ most devotedly erratic wild man, rasping “I want my pig.” First-time feature writer-director Michael Sarnoski, working from a story he wrote with producer Vanessa Block, lets the underlying comic dissonance register without turning his drama into a joke. Pig isn’t the gripping mystery Sarnoski might have intended, but as a crawl through the underbelly of a hipster city’s glamorous foodie culture, it’s a gutsy narrative recipe, even if the final dish is less than the sum of its ingredients. Through it all, Cage plays the enigmatic central character at the perfect simmering temperature, and without a shred of ham.

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Release date: Friday, July 16

Director-screenwriter:  Michael Sarnoski

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Alex Wolff, Adam Arkin

It’s nine minutes into the film before Rob speaks: a few muttered words to his porcine partner, a devoted creature with a tail-wagging, puppy-like demeanor — and one who’s blessedly never reduced to cute animal reaction shots. The only regular visitor to Rob’s remote cabin is Amir ( Alex Wolff ), an ambitious up-and-comer who buys the precious fungi from him, in turn selling them to chefs in the city. The always compelling Wolff offers an arresting contrast to Cage’s seething stillness, deftly signaling the self-doubt beneath Amir’s fidgety snark. In the old-growth forest, with its mystical, edge-of-civilization serenity (captured in painterly strokes by DP Pat Scola), the young man’s garish yellow sports car might as well be a flying saucer.

Their nonexistent rapport notwithstanding, it’s Amir’s help that Rob enlists after the pig is abducted in a violent nighttime break-in — and after Rob’s rackety old truck dies before he can get to the city, where he’s sure he’ll find the culprit. Once his protagonist is away from his rudimentary lair, Sarnoski’s screenplay takes him on a tragicomic descent into hell, one that revolves around high-stakes matters of money and status, truffle poaching, the purveying of comestibles, and the perceived golden-goose value of a pig.

At their darkest and most grungy, the stops along this passage through Hades (culminating in a visit to a restaurant called Eurydice) can’t quite shake off the feel of screenwriterly indulgences, notably in a pummeling visit to a subterranean fight club for restaurant workers, run by some kind of hotshot named Edgar (Darius Pierce). The sequence leaves Cage’s searcher even more beaten and bloodied than he already was from the kidnappers, but this time in a way that perhaps satisfies some deep-seated need or quells a traumatic grief. “You don’t even exist anymore,” Edgar tells him, but Rob’s beating has made clear to the audience — and to Amir — just how much of a contender Rob once was, and how much of a legend among Portland’s culinary cognoscenti.

As Amir helps Rob gain entry to top-notch eateries in search of the perpetrator, it’s telling that he’s less embarrassed about Rob’s unkempt mountain-man appearance than he is about stepping into territory controlled by his father (Adam Arkin). It’s the old man’s career as “king of rare foods” that Amir emulates, but they’re competitors, not partners or allies. When talking about his father, this rich kid can’t quite finish his sentences. Wolff wields those uncomfortable fadeouts with emotion-packed nuance, a subtlety he also brings to scenes of gothic horror at the family mansion.

Rob’s relentless search crescendos when, in filthy clothes and with his face caked in dried blood, he sits down to lunch at one of the city’s hottest white-tablecloth spots. Wolff makes Amir’s behind-the-scenes finagling for the reservation a finely tuned balancing act of assertion and self-erasure. (Earlier, he delivers the film’s best throwaway line, when Amir tells a restaurant employee who’s suspiciously eyeing the longhaired and fashion-backward Rob, “He’s Buddhist.”)

There’s something perversely satisfying (and a little bit Portlandia ) about watching Rob among the lunchtime see-and-be-seen at Eurydice, a citadel of molecular gastronomy. At the center of the sunlit room, Cage is a vortex of charged expectancy. Still, the scene’s jabs at trendiness — the worship of locally sourced ingredients, the sous vide and foam and smoke — feel anything but fresh, There’s one line that’s a crucial exception, but most of Rob’s words of warning and wisdom to the eatery’s careerist chef (David Knell), a nervous mass of faux smiles, feel like well-chewed and reconstituted morsels, less deep than meets the eye.

As to what’s pure and true, Sarnoski stacks the deck. He divides the film into three sections, each named for a recipe or a meal, the first of which, “Rustic Mushroom Tart,” establishes the simple, unrefined integrity of Rob and his cooking (which he shares with his beloved pig). Eventually it’s revealed that the restaurant that put him on the foodie map was named Hestia, after the Greek goddess of the hearth. So there’s that.

Whatever the screenplay’s stumbles, Cage’s contained performance embraces his character’s losses and his turning away from the world without the slightest play for sympathy. Whatever Rob’s emotional damage, the way he carries himself suggests a man who knows his worth and his talent. It’s too bad that, in a climactic moment, Sarnoski’s otherwise solid direction leaves his star adrift.

But the final scene delivers unexpected shivers of longing and connection. A disembodied voice from the past (Cassandra Violet) fills in a piece or two of Rob’s story. This happens in a way that spells out nothing. There’s no recipe for it, just the forest and its cleansing, complicating light.

Full credits

Distributor: Neon Production companies: Ai Film, Endeavor Content, Pulse Films, Blockbox Entertainment, Valparaiso Pictures, Saturn Films Cast: Nicolas Cage, Alex Wolff, Adam Arkin, Cassandra Violet, Darius Pierce, David Knell Director-screenwriter: Michael Sarnoski Story by Vanessa Block, Michael Sarnoski Producers: Nicolas Cage, Steve Tisch, David Carrico, Adam Paulsen, Dori Roth, Joseph Restaino, Dimitra Tsingou, Thomas Benski, Ben Giladi, Vanessa Block Executive producers: Len Blavatnik, Aviv Giladi, Danny Cohen, Marisa Clifford, Tim O’Shea, Michael Sarnoski, Robert Bartner, Yara Shoemaker, Bobby Hoppey Director of photography: Pat Scola Production designer: Tyler Robinson Costume designer: Jayme Hansen Editor: Brett W. Bachman Music: Alexis Gapsas, Phillip Klein Casting director: Simon Max Hill

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A truffle hunter who lives alone in the Oregon wilderness must return to his past in Portland in search of his beloved foraging pig after she is kidnapped. A truffle hunter who lives alone in the Oregon wilderness must return to his past in Portland in search of his beloved foraging pig after she is kidnapped. A truffle hunter who lives alone in the Oregon wilderness must return to his past in Portland in search of his beloved foraging pig after she is kidnapped.

• Michael Sarnoski
• Vanessa Block
• Nicolas Cage
• 1K User reviews
• 243 Critic reviews
• 82 Metascore
• 38 wins & 74 nominations

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• Audiobook Narrator

• (as Kevin-Michael Moore)

• Butcher Joe

• Chef Finway

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Nicolas Cage on the Roles That Changed His Life

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• Trivia In an after film Q&A, director Michael Sarnoski revealed the pig only had three days of training and bit Nicolas Cage multiple times. After a particularly nasty bite, Cage joked: "I've been set on fire, I've been in flipped cars but it'll be sepsis from a pig bite that kills me."
• Goofs When the characters are talking about Mt. Hood and looking at it in the distance, the mountain is shown as being beyond the west hills of Portland. In reality, Mt. Hood is east of Portland. The mountain in the film is CGI.

Rob : We don't get a lot of things to really care about.

• Crazy credits After the song that Lori has recorded for Rob ends, one can hear nature sounds, someone digging for truffles, and a pig.
• Connections Featured in Chris Stuckmann Movie Reviews: Pig - Josee, the Tiger and the Fish (2021)
• Soundtracks Danse Macabre Written by Camille Saint-Saëns , Public Domain Arranged by Ossi Bashiri Courtesy of Extreme Music

User reviews 1K

• Oct 18, 2021
• How long is Pig? Powered by Alexa
• July 16, 2021 (United States)
• United States
• United Kingdom
• Official Pig
• Official site
• 208 SW Broadway, Portland, Oregon, USA (Lunch scene at Eurydice. In real life this location was, at the time, a portion of the Saucebox restaurant.)
• Altitude Film
• BlockBox Entertainment
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• Jul 18, 2021

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 32 minutes

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‘Pig’ Review: Nicolas Cage Is at His Melancholic Best in This Strange, Sad Porcine Drama

A million miles from ‘Peggy Sue Got Married,’ Cage goes searching for his beloved truffle pig — and himself — in Michael Sarnoski’s intimate character study.

By Michael Nordine

Michael Nordine

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Nicolas Cage isn’t just an actor; he’s a state of mind. Having transcended meme status with evocative performances in director-driven genre fare like “Mandy” and “Color Out of Space,” the Oscar winner delivers his best performance in years as a chef-turned-recluse who briefly reenters society in writer-director Michael Sarnoski ’s “ Pig .” His return isn’t a happy one, however: Robin (Cage) only leaves the Oregonian wilderness after his beloved truffle pig is violently taken from him. Less revenge thriller than intimate character study, “Pig” is above all else a reminder that Cage is among the most gifted, fearless actors working today.

Robin’s routine is simple: He and his pig forage for truffles picked up once a week by his sole contact with the outside world (Alex Wolff), with many fine meals and quiet moments in between. It’s clear from the outset that this bearded, disheveled man isn’t entirely well and was driven into the woods by an unspecified trauma he’s in no rush to share with the world, but the humble existence he and his unnamed pet have been eking out seems to be enough for him — in some ways it’s even idyllic. It can’t last, of course, and we’ve only just met the precocious porker when she’s kidnapped by unidentified evildoers.

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What first impresses about “Pig” is the way it manages to feel both out there and grounded, often at the same time. Aside from the obviously far-fetched nature of its premise, it includes everything from an underground fight club for restaurant workers to chapter titles like “Rustic Mushroom Tart” and “Mom’s French Toast and Deconstructed Scallops.” But it never slips into absurdity, with Sarnoski’s sparse dialogue complemented by a fittingly low-key score courtesy of Alexis Grapsas and Philip Klein. That’s also why it’s impossible to imagine anyone but Cage in the lead role: No one else can simultaneously embrace and elevate inherently ridiculous plot developments like he can while finding something close to the profound in it all.

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“I remember a time when your name meant something to people, Robin,” comments the first person he sees upon his return to Portland. “But now? You have no value. You don’t even exist anymore.” The secret of this past self hums alongside the mystery of the pig’s whereabouts, and is no less compelling for the fact that Robin’s heartbreak is visible in every line on his face and every grey hair on his head. Cage pours himself into the performance, bringing a blunt earnestness to laugh cues like “I don’t fuck my pig” and “Your dad sounds terrible” that manage to be funny without allowing us to laugh at Robin.

None of this would be as effective were it not for Wolff, who plays off Cage with aplomb. The two end up a kind of odd-couple comedy duo, with Max as the straight man trying to keep a low profile and Robin as the unkempt oddball who, throughout the entire ordeal, never wipes the blood off his face or cleans the wounds he sustained while his beloved was being taken from him. Then there’s the unnamed pig herself, who’s both a MacGuffin and a compelling presence despite her limited screen time. Anyone who saw “Gunda” knows how soulful our porcine friends can be, and so it is here.

They never should have taken the pig, just as they never should have taken that stuffed bunny in “Con Air,” but Robin never gives the impression that he’s on the warpath and those who wronged him are about to be sorry. However much we may want “Pig” to turn into something like “John Wick,” Sarnoski refuses the temptation at every return — our hero is simply too worn down to do the sort of things we’re used to seeing Cage do.

As a descent into the apparently high-stakes world of truffle-pig-poaching, “Pig” is unexpectedly touching; as a showcase for Cage’s brilliance, it’s a revelation. “We don’t get a lot of things to really care about,” Robin tells a fellow chef at the end of a stirring monologue about our aspirations, the fleeting nature of success, and everything in between. Whether it be truffles, animal companions, or something entirely different, we should all be lucky enough to care about something as much as Robin cares about his pig, regardless of how it turns out.

Reviewed online, Denver, Co., July 10, 2021. Running time: 92 MIN.

• Production: A Neon, AI Film presentation of a Pulse Films, Blockbox Entertainment, Valparaiso Pictures, Saturn Films production, in association with Endeavor Content. Producers: Vanessa Block, Dimitra Tsingou, Thomas Benski, Ben Giladi, Dori Rath, Joseph Restanio, David Carrico, Adam Paulsen, Steve Tisch, Nicolas Cage.
• Crew: Director: Michael Sarnoski. Screenplay: Michael Sarnoski; story: Michael Sarnoski, Vanessa Block. Camera: Patrick Scola. Editor: Brett W. Bachman. Music: Alexis Grapsas, Philip Klein.
• With: Nicolas Cage, Alex Wolff, Adam Arkin, Nina Belforte, Cassandra Violet, Julia Bray, Elijah Ungvary, Beth Harper, Brian Sutherland, David Shaughnessy, Gretchen Corbett.

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See Pig and Tremble Before Your Own Mortality

More Zen fable than genre picture, Michael Sarnoski’s Pig delights in defying expectations. After its opening 20 or so minutes, you could easily mistake it for a revenge movie, or at least some kind of hillbilly-noir quest narrative. But those expecting a sillier variation on John Wick or Taken or even previous idiosyncratic Nicolas Cage outings like Mandy may be in for some disappointment. Pig (now in theaters via Neon Releasing) is in no way that kind of movie. As it proceeds, it expands its vision and compassion, even as it de-escalates the tension. It’s not about the thing it’s about, except that it ultimately is totally about the thing it’s about.

Okay, let me explain what I mean. Nicolas Cage plays a grizzled, mournful hermit named Rob who lives in the woods of the Pacific Northwest and spends his days hunting truffles with his pig, Apple, and then trading them to big-city buyer Amir (Alex Wolff). One night, a couple of intruders beat Rob up and steal Apple. Truffles are big business in the growing high-end Portland restaurant scene, and a well-trained truffle pig is obviously very valuable. The distraught, vengeful Rob calls up Amir, and the two head into the city on a journey that takes them to posh restaurants and underground fight clubs in their efforts to locate Apple.

That sounds like a goofy idea for a story, but as played out onscreen, it’s even goofier. Leaving aside the slightly surreal notion that all this hullaballoo is happening over a truffle pig, Sarnoski drops a number of visual hints as to the metaphorical nature of this quest. For starters, the grizzled, grimy Rob is increasingly wounded and covered in blood as the evening proceeds. He doesn’t even wash the blood off his face after he’s pummeled in a late-night beatdown, and he’s already covered in scars from the initial, quite violent theft of his pig. And Cage — still one of our bravest actors — plays Rob with a ghostly rigidity that regularly slips from coiled aggression to stone-faced deadpan. He feels true, but he doesn’t feel real.

As the duo travel through the city, Amir discovers that Rob’s full name — Robin Feld — can still open lots of doors. He was, 15 years earlier, Portland’s most respected, beloved chef. We also find out — gradually, in dribs and drabs — what made Robin turn away from his profession. But Amir also has a backstory, one that increasingly connects with Robin’s. Back when he was a kid, his parents had a memorable dinner at Robin’s restaurant, and he recalls that it was the only time they didn’t come back from their date night fighting. The power of food to heal, to release emotions long suppressed, runs throughout Pig . But that has little to do with food and more to do with connection, a sense of being present and alive that food in its purest form represents.

Most movies that try to explore characters’ backstories would go out of their way to give us heavy details about the past — either via flashbacks or long, anguished dialogue scenes. Pig treads lightly, letting us absorb information through tossed-off lines and moments of silence. Sarnoski is often content to focus his camera on a small detail or glance, or to cut away right in the middle of a dramatic moment, as if trying to represent cinematically the mindfulness that Robin seeks, and that maybe he lost with the theft of his pig.

Pig ’s funniest, most powerful moment comes when Robin and Amir visit the city’s hottest restaurant, a kind of super-fancy locavore haute-cuisine outlet where the ornate, minuscule dishes come with a poetic lecture about the Earth that takes longer than it would to eat the actual food. Calling the chef (David Knell), a former employee of his, to the table, Robin tells him that everything around them is meaningless: “The critics aren’t real, the customers aren’t real, because this isn’t real. You aren’t real. Why do you care about these people? … They don’t even know you, because you haven’t shown them. Every day you wake up and there’ll be less of you.” Cage’s haunted delivery, contrasting powerfully with Knell’s anxious, terrified giggling, gives the scene a metaphysical kick. His speech starts off feeling like a stinging humiliation of a stuck-up foodie chef, until we gradually realize that Robin is talking about himself. “We don’t get a lot of things to really care about,” he finally sighs. “Derek, who has my pig?”

That pig is the only thing that matters to Robin, because it’s the only thing he’s got left that he cares about, and once the pig is gone, he too may be gone. Each step that brings Robin and Amir closer to Apple seems to bring them closer to their own past. These scenes also play out like individual stations in a series of abasement rituals, in which Robin is beaten both physically and spiritually — as if, after years of hiding in the woods, he’s finally coming face-to-face with his own mortality and meaninglessness, his own impermanence. During an earlier monologue, Robin talks about the great earthquake that will one day level the Pacific Northwest , and at times his words sound not like a prophecy or a warning, but an oblique recollection of the emotional earthquake that devastated him. There’s one more fold to that, however — something more cosmic that reflects on the nature of life itself. Every day we wake up, there’s less of us, too. We all lose the things we care about, until we also are finally gone.

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“Pig,” Reviewed: Nicolas Cage Is the Only Reason to Watch

The truffle is a bridge object, spanning nature and culture, rustic ways and urbane refinements. Because it’s not grown but found, a culinary gemstone demanding physical labor, venerable traditional knowledge, and amazing animals, it’s an automatic symbol and a cipher that merely awaits the application of chosen meanings. “Pig,” written and directed by Michael Sarnoski (who co-wrote the story with Vanessa Block), is, in that regard, a truffle of a movie, and its premise marks the precious fungus with a hand-wavingly wide and vague symbolism that permeates the entire story, which strains to mean so much and to matter so much that it vitiates itself into illustrative, portentous absurdity. The film is redeemed only by the dour, weary, mournful, stubborn, and wise performance of Nicolas Cage, which is not so much a star turn as the project’s sole raison d’être.

Cage plays a hermit named Robin Feld who lives in a cabin in the woods of Oregon, with his truffle pig. Robin’s isolation is nearly total—he has one client for his truffles, a slick and glib young man named Amir (Alex Wolff), who drives up in a conspicuously expensive sports car and spatters Robin with wisecracks while paying for the delicacies. But Robin’s isolation is emblazoned, from the start, with a very conspicuous single root cause: he is in mourning for a woman, whose death—never dated, never explained—has driven him out of society.

Then, shortly after Amir’s most recent visit, intruders break in, slam Robin to the floor, and steal the pig. There are obvious shades of “John Wick,” both in the uxorious grief and in the animal story. But, unlike Keanu Reeves’s vengeful hitman, Robin isn’t out for revenge, just for his pig. He’s got no one to turn to except Amir, who is persuaded to drive him to the nearby metropolis of Portland. There, what seems like Robin’s floundering and desperate long shot is revealed to be a sharply targeted hunt, because neither Portland nor the foodie scene are foreign to him: in a former life, it turns out, he was one of the city’s major and revered chefs, before heading for the woods fifteen years ago. With Amir’s help, Robin—so cut off from his former milieu that some of his former cohorts had assumed he’d died—makes his way through the city’s high-end dining scene in search of the thieves.

The quest, however, is tinged with absurdities that function like onscreen emojis, there to proclaim what Sarnoski intends to say and nothing more. One emblematic moment, in which Robin trumpets his return, involves his absorbing of atrocious punishment in a secretive underground fight club reserved for the exploitation of the city’s restaurant workers. It’s hardly a spoiler to say that Robin, already banged up by the pig thieves, spends the rest of the film scabbed and bruised and broken and smeared with his own blood, a giant fly in the overchilled vichyssoise of the inhumanly, pretentiously pristine gastronomical showcases that are the way stations of his investigation. Robin’s deep knowledge of Portland history—displaying his sense of tradition underneath the frippery—gradually but ineluctably leads to the movie’s meatball scene, the one that delivers its dose of populist demagogy in a single bite.

That scene takes place in the jewel box of Portland restaurants, a place where a reservation is a precious commodity that requires the formidable pulling of strings. At a meal of a comedically exaggerated chichi-ness, featuring turd-like lumps of emulsified scallops, “on a bed of foraged huckleberry foam,” under a dome of smoke, the stained and snaggle-toothed and blood-crusted Robin confronts the celebrated chef (David Knell), the toast of Portland, and calmly, patiently, surgically insults his cooking, his restaurant, his clientele, his fame, and—underlying it all—his commercial sellout of his erstwhile hearty and populist-cuisine dreams in favor of the frivolous acclaim of people (rich customers and pompous critics) for whom Robin has no respect and no regard. It’s as if grief has burned all worldly aspirations out of Robin, has wrenched the scales from his eyes and revealed the awful truth of the restaurant world and of the world at large. Alone in his cabin, a silent prophet of unvarnished and earthy sincerity—he’s an avatar of honest food , and there’s no deceit in the truffle —the theft of his pig has forced him back into the world and turned him into a vocal prophet whose quiet jeremiad is the linchpin of the movie and the moment in which Sarnoski tips his own hand into overt, banal, and self-justifying message-mongering.

What about the artistry, the aesthetic imagination, the full spectrum of cinematic drama that’s missing from “Pig”? It’s a movie that tells its story with TV-commercial images of a blatantly mood-conditioning simplification, with a skipping-about drama that incarnates its key plot points without seeming to know how or whether its characters exist in between them. This plain and bland realism rests heavily, like a manhole cover, on Robin, keeping down the entire range of experience and knowledge that he bears, his memories and his agonies and his sloughed-off aspirations, which are dosed out as big reveals solely as they serve to connect the dots of the story. Which is to say that “Pig” is not a particularly bad movie in its style, its form, its tone, its conception. It’s merely a painfully ordinary one, an algorithmic movie like many others, catering to the expectations of the moderately mainstream marketplace—not a fast-food movie but ostensibly hearty fare of the kind that Robin upholds as a worthy aspiration, a pleaser of an only lightly filtered and self-selecting crowd. What’s more, the chichi chef is revealed to have been an inadequate assistant, an ostensible master building his fraudulent glory on the hollow foundation of a lack of craft, of deficient professionalism. (That’s how the mediocre mainstream has ever damned the boldly original.) Whatever kinds of creative flourishes or audaciously original concepts go into making an exceptional movie (like an exceptional restaurant) are, here, relegated to the realm of the insincere, the arch, the unredeemably artificial and artsy—and of the pretentious, false viewers and critics who seek them out and pretend to enjoy them.

What’s left, however, is Cage’s trudging, punished performance. Competence is hardly the point; more or less any of the talented actors of Hollywood acclaim could bring allure and emotion to the role of Robin. But there’s one particular and peculiar aspect of the role that Cage seems to own and that he endows with the depth and burden of his own character and experience: martyrdom. Perhaps only Willem Dafoe, nearly of Cage’s generation, bears the same sense of self-torment, though Dafoe also glows with a non-militaristic martial hardness that converts affliction to energy. For Cage, the pain is the point: he conveys the sense of drinking deep of agony, as if deserving it, and Sarnoski takes full advantage of that artistic persona. The character that Cage portrays is incoherent, illustrative, and ludicrous, and yet his portrayal makes the movie. Cage turns its unreflective dramatic form and unchallenging narrative conventions into a kind of living nightmare, which bypasses the movie’s mediocre ideas and trivial plot and raises it—if only a few fleeting moments at a time—into the realm of the extraordinary. On the other hand, a director who understands such cinematic martyrdom profoundly—Paul Schrader—cast both Cage and Dafoe in the wild crime drama “ Dog Eat Dog ,” from 2016, which offers Cage a spectacular climactic scene of tragicomic martyrdom and terrifying fury. Stream it instead.

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Review: The Nicolas Cage drama ‘Pig’ is an unusually beautiful meditation on loss

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The Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic . Because moviegoing carries risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and local health officials .

A man who was once an in-demand specialist — living a life marred by moments of eruptive rage — is roused out of retirement when an animal he loves is taken from him by shady criminals. Driven to revenge, he returns to his old stamping grounds, where he reacquaints himself with the arcane rules and the strict hierarchy of his past.

Sound a little like “John Wick”? Or “Taken” ? Or some other pulpy action picture about a rugged antihero getting reluctantly dragged back into a bloody fray?

Well, that’s not quite the way things go with “Pig,” a low-boil indie drama that features the game-for-anything genre-movie star Nicolas Cage in the lead, yet in no way could be described as a “thriller.” Though its plot follows the same rough outline of a “John Wick”-style shoot-em-up, “Pig” is actually a quiet and often melancholy meditation on loss, anchored by a character who wishes he could shake free of the person he used to be.

The first feature from the writer-director Michael Sarnoski (from a story co-written with Vanessa Block), “Pig” is divided into three parts, each given a title that reads like an haute cuisine menu item: “Rustic Mushroom Tart,” “Deconstructed Scallops,” etc. Part one introduces Robin Feld (Cage), a talented chef who lives way off the grid, deep in an Oregon forest with only his beloved truffle pig for company — plus some old cassette tapes made by a woman he loved.

When burglars beat him up and steal the pig, Rob calls on Amir ( Alex Wolff ), a rich Portland hipster who’s been bartering for Rob’s truffles to sell to upscale eateries. What Amir doesn’t know is that Rob is already well-acquainted with the intricacies of Portland’s foodie world: from the boutique suppliers to the ruthless bistro owners to the underground fight clubs where all the competitors are restaurant workers.

The phrase “underground fight clubs” should give some indication that “Pig” can be a bit — well, bizarre. There are surprising moments sprinkled throughout the film, including revelations about Rob and the folks he meets that are kept just vague enough to spark the viewer’s imagination, suggesting some painful secrets and hidden connections. And while the situation and the setting may be somewhat over the top, the characters’ reactions are always grounded in reality.

Sarnoski doesn’t answer every question the audience might have. (Boldly, he keeps the specifics of what happened to Rob’s old flame shrouded in mystery.) Instead, “Pig” focuses on fleshing out this stiflingly insular Portland community, filled with people who’ve turned the business of selling food into a blood sport. As Rob shuffles between various hotspots — getting somehow more caked with grime and gore with each passing hour — it’s easy to understand why he so desperately wanted to detach in the first place.

Inevitably, Rob runs into his shadow-self: a stern restaurant product-broker named Darius, played with a chilling steeliness by Adam Arkin . If anyone would know who in the Portland area had recently seized a truffle pig, it would be Darius, a man for whom nearly every aspect of existence is transactional. But whether he’d be willing to share that kind of valuable information is another matter.

Despite a few scenes here and there of Rob snarling, “I want my pig back!” this movie is not the kind of offbeat goof Cage has become infamous for lately. “Pig” is a rich character study, marked by several riveting Cage monologues, as Rob ruminates on the tricky taste of persimmons, or as he warns the Portland status-seekers that the things they think matter will be wiped away when catastrophe comes.

Rob is referring to environmental disasters, but he could just as easily be talking about losing a person — or a pig — that means more than any four-star food-blogger review. What makes this strange little movie so moving and even beautiful is that it takes Rob’s pig-saving mission as seriously as it takes his conviction that society as we know it is hopelessly rotten.

And yet he remains a tragic figure in a way, this pig-loving husk of a man. Rob wants to leave behind everything that’s gone sour in his life. But the flavors and aromas are all around him, lingering on his palate.

'Pig'

Rated: R, for language and some violence. Running time: 1 hour, 31 minutes Playing: Starts July 16 in general release

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'Pig' Review: Nicolas Cage Gives One Of His Best Performances In This Haunting Drama

" Nicolas Cage is a guy looking for his stolen pig," the general premise of  Michael Sarnoski 's elegant, haunting, mournful movie Pig , likely inspires more than a few assumptions. You'd be forgiven for assuming that a movie like that would be some sort of goofy, indie  John Wick  knock-off. You'd also be forgiven for assuming that Cage, playing the man searching for his pilfered porcine pal, goes over the top. After all, Cage has become legendary for becoming unhinged on screen. And he's become notorious for appearing in a lot of junk, too.

But within moments of starting,  Pig demands you leave all those assumptions behind you. Because  Pig is not the movie you think it is. It's something far more beautiful, and far more painful. It is an existential meditation on the search for  something. Anything . A kind of cosmic loneliness envelopes this film. It's extraordinary.

Cage is Rob, a mysterious, grizzled man who lives out in the wilderness with only his truffle-hunting pig for company. By day, Rob and the pig take to the woods in search of fancy fungi. By night, they return to a ramshackle cabin, where the pig has its own little bed mere inches away from Rob's. The only real human contact Rob has is with Amir ( Alex Wolff ), a hotshot trying to make a name for himself in the Portland restaurant scene. Amir stops by in his cool car on Thusdays to purchase Rob's truffles.

Rob's life is simple, quiet. Watching him is like watching part of the scenery – as if the character is blending into the nature he inhabits. These early moments have an earthy quality that teases our scenes; we can smell the woods, the dirt, the small little private world Rob inhabits. But this tranquility will not last. Late one night, a pair of drug addicts burst into Rob's home, knock him out, and steal his pig. It's a harrowing, horrifying scene, made all the more disturbing by the human-like screams emitting from the kidnapped pig. It breaks your heart.

Here is where you might think the movie turns into  John Wick But With a Pig Instead of a Dog . "Ah-ha!" you might say after the big, brutal pig snatching scene. "Now Nic Cage is going to go  crazy and enact bloody revenge against those who wronged him!" But remember:  Pig is not the movie you think it is. Bloody and bruised, Rob picks himself up and sets out to find his pig, dragging Amir along with him. Rob has no means of transportation, so Amir becomes his reluctant chauffeur.

As Rob and Amir search for the pig, Rob's backstory comes clearer into focus. We learn he was once a renowned chef, but that he's been off the grid for 15 years. That time away hasn't diminished his celebrity, though. If anything, it's made it stronger. When Rob enters a restaurant and the people working there realize who he is, they're awed, as if they're having some sort of religious experience. As if Rob was the Pope and they were the faithful ready to bury their faces in his vestments.

Writer-director Sarnoski does a fair amount of subtle world-building here. Rob and Amir are not moving through the restaurant scene as you or I would. They're instead traveling through backrooms and places where regular customers would not be welcome. A surreal quality unfolds here, as if we're not entirely sure if what we're witnessing is meant to be taken seriously, or if it's supposed to be some heightened, fantasized underground world. It's a world where things can get violent, and nasty. Where secret chef fight clubs take place in basements and dank rooms that have never experienced a single sliver of sunlight.

Rob moves through this world seeming both at ease and an outsider. He knows he's a legend; he knows he is a chef unlike any other. But he also wants to be left alone. Were it not for his pig, he would not be bothering with this world again. Cage plays all of this with a subtle grace that is bound to shock folks who have come to (wrongly) believe that the actor plays everything big and loud. Yes, Cage can go coo-coo sometimes – there's no arguing against that. Yet there is so much more to the actor's talents that so many people willingly overlook. They want Cage to be a walking meme, and Cage seems willing to indulge this – up to a point. But he's also capable of true nuance, and beauty. He's one of our most fascinating working actors, and here he delivers one of the best performances of his entire career. A soulful, introspective, melancholy performance that is so strong, so present, that it carries real weight.

Wolff makes for a great companion on this journey. His twitchy, blustery character is constantly acting bigger than he really is, and just as we learn more about Rob as the story unfolds, we also learn more about Amir, and his background involving a demanding, powerful father, played by  Adam Arkin , who shows up late in the film and makes quite an impression, making sure every single second of his small screentime counts.

Rob is a lost soul, and as we all are in our own little ways. He's not just searching for his pig, he's also searching for some sort of truth, some sort of beauty. His cooking is his art, and it's something perhaps too pure to share with the world regularly. Perhaps that's why he dropped off the face of the earth and hid his gifts away. Now, as he continues his search, he once again finds himself cooking for others. They bite into Rob's food and unlock memories and dreams long since tucked away and lost.  Pig is a lot like Rob's food, awakening something within us. We come away changed, tears in our eyes.  Pig is not the movie you think it is.

/Film Rating: 9 out of 10

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‘Pig’ Review: Come Back, Trotter

Nicolas Cage plays a reclusive truffle hunter in this fiercely controlled character drama.

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By Jeannette Catsoulis

Shielded by a rat’s-nest beard and layers of decaying clothing, Rob (Nicolas Cage) lives in a rudimentary cabin in the Oregon wilderness with his beloved pig. Together, they forage for truffles that Rob barters for necessities when Amir (an indispensable Alex Wolff) makes his weekly visit. The truffles are bound for high-end Portland restaurants; when the pig is stolen, her owner will be compelled to follow the fungi.

“Pig,” Michael Sarnoski’s stunningly controlled first feature, is a mournful fable of loss and withdrawal, art and ambition. Told in three chapters and a string of beautifully delineated scenes, the movie flirts with several genres — revenge drama, culinary satire — while committing to none. Instead, Sarnoski takes us on an enigmatic journey as Rob searches for his pet and revisits a life he long-ago abandoned.

Pit stops at an underground fight club for restaurant workers, and at a favorite baker for a prized salted baguette, are both moving and strange, leaving us with more questions than answers. Once, Rob had stature in this world; now, in the words of Amir’s powerful father, Darius (Adam Arkin), he no longer even exists. Yet he and Darius are the same: twin disconsolates, imprisoned by heartbreak. And while “Pig” can at times feel engulfed by its own sullenness, there’s a rigor to the filmmaking and a surreal beauty to Pat Scola’s images that seal our investment in Rob’s fate.

Cage is superb here, giving Rob a subdued implacability and a voice that initially croaks from disuse and later swells with quiet conviction. When Rob delivers a speech about the madness of choosing profit over dreams, it lands with the full weight of an actor who seems to know whereof he speaks.

Pig Rated R for an extended beat down. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters.

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Pig is Now Best-Reviewed Live-Action Movie of Nicolas Cage's Career

The story of a man and his hammy best friend features an unexpectedly career-best performance that critics have embraced..

TAGGED AS: Film , films , movies

(Photo by Neon)

When the Pig trailer surfaced ahead of its July theatrical debut, audiences were baffled. Was this Nicolas Cage movie, ostensibly the story of a Pacific Northwest recluse and his stolen truffle pig, going to be a revenge thriller like Mandy ? Would it be in the realm of recent Rage Cage (TM) genre offerings, including Willy’s Wonderland and Color Out of Space ?

Pig  – which hits platforms today like Vudu and Amazon Prime – is, in fact, nothing like those. And what  Pig reveals itself to be is perhaps even more audacious: A deeply melancholic and meditative drama, with a towering, career-best performance from Cage as the withdrawn yet sympathetic former chef Rob Feld, who cuts into the dark underbelly of the gourmet dining scene. In our Critics Consensus, we sum it up: “Like the animal itself, Pig defies the hogwash of expectations with a beautiful odyssey of loss and love anchored by Nicolas Cage’s affectingly raw performance.”

With such a full trough of laurels and plaudits, no surprise then that Pig is currently the best-reviewed live-action movie of Cage’s career: It’s Certified Fresh with a Tomatometer score of 97% after 151 reviews.

“I wanted to get back to a kind of a quiet, meditative, internalized performance,” Cage tells us in a recent interview . “It was something that I felt I had the life experience for and the memories and the dreams, if you will, to portray without forcing it.”

In our list of every Nicolas Cage movie ranked by Tomatometer , you’ll see that Pig ‘s Tomatometer score actually matches Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse ‘s, where he voiced Spider-Man Noir. But since Spider-Verse has more reviews (391 total) hanging off its 97% score, we give the no. 1 spot to the beloved animated superhero blockbuster.

Other Certified Fresh Nic Cage movies in the 90th-percentile include Leaving Las Vegas (for which he won the Best Actor Oscar), Teen Titans Go! To the Movies , Raising Arizona , Adaptation , Face/Off , and Moonstruck .

Pig   is in theaters and streaming now. 

On an Apple device? Follow Rotten Tomatoes on Apple News .

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• Searching for Meaning in Nicolas Cage’s Truffle Flick, ‘Pig’

The Michael Sarnoski film about a former chef searching for his truffle-hunting pig is tonally inconsistent and narratively incoherent

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The only thing shaved in Pig — which I’d call a Nicolas Cage vehicle, but vehicle to where? — are the black truffles buried deep in the Oregonian forest. Everyone else is hirsute; everything else hairy. This includes Rob, who we first meet munching dirt and slowly scampering through the forest. Played by Cage as a series of grunts and a beard, Robin Feld is a former hotshot Portland chef who, after a personal tragedy, takes to the woods to, with the help of an adorable pig ( uncredited ), eke out a living by hunting leucangium carthusianum , better known as Oregon black truffles.

When his pig is stolen in the dead of night with a squall of squeals (pig) and murmurs (thieves), the gears of the movie start turning like a Jean Tinguely sculpture . Rob returns to the city in a slo-mo mumblecore porcine hunt. While the trailer suggests an action-packed revenge flick — like Taken but with a pig — the film actually feels more like endless errands, listlessly run.

Rob is accompanied on his mythopoetic porco-quixotic journey through Portland by Amir (Alex Wolff), an upstart entrepreneur trying to establish himself as a truffle dealer. Amir is Rob’s only point of contact with the world, and regularly visits Old Man Rob in his cabin to purchase his foraged truffles. Amir drives a bitchin’ Camaro, blasting classical music, and wears a silly — though I daresay fetching — Puss in Boots goatee with a ridiculous Gucci belt buckle, which is considerably less fetching. They are a study in opposites. Rob drives a broken-down pickup truck, wears fingerless gloves, a Mr. Twit beard, and filthy long johns. He’s a sullen Thoreau, minus the poetry.

Once in Portland, the unlikely duo embarks on a series of increasingly outlandish and Odyssean adventures which are meant, somehow, to ladder up to finding his pig. (Rob, as he makes clear, loves this pig and not just for her economic relevance.) For instance, in the shadows of a food cart pod, they meet Edgar (Darius Pierce), another bearded sad sack who runs an underground fight club for restaurant workers in the subterranean remnants of the now-closed Hotel Portland. When he refuses to tell Rob where the pig is (“I remember a time your name meant something to people, Robin. But now? You have no value. You don’t even exist anymore,” he says, admirably straight-faced), Rob, for some reason, heads to the fight club and subjects himself to a beating by a small man in a pink waistcoat. Like Mario bonking his head on a brick, this act of self-harm yields from Edgar the name of a chef, Finway, who might have a bead on this missing pig. Blood matted into his biblical beard and besmirching his brow, Cage is off and the hunt is on.

If all this sounds madcap and maybe funny, it isn’t. Cinematographically, Pig is shot with unrelenting solemnity. Everything is overcast; everyone’s bummed. The city is bathed in darkness; the forest in shadow. The overarching vibe is womp.

Anyway, Finway’s place, Eurydice, is the hottest restaurant in Portland. The room is bathed in whiteness, from the linens to the plates to the patrons. Rob and Amir score a table and are greeted with a Portlandia- level send-up of fine dining. We open with a close-up shot of a server as New Age-y music plays quietly in the background: “Today’s journey begins by uniting the depths of the sea with the riches of our forests. We’ve emulsified locally sourced scallops encased in a flash-frozen seawater roe blend on a bed of foraged huckleberry foam. All bathed in the smoke of Douglas fir cones.”

She opens a glass cloche, smoke billows, and Rob eyes the deconstructed scallop suspiciously. “I’d like to speak to the chef,” he says, in that absolutely inimitable Cage-ian cadence. (It is both bored-sounding and threatening.) Finway, a clown of a man, played in high camp by David Knell, was, it turns out, fired by Rob years ago, and Rob uses his near-total recall of past events and dishes to demoralize him, telling Finway his critics and customers “aren’t real.” “Didn’t you want to open a pub?” he asks, “You live your life for them and they don’t even see you.” The scene ends with Finway in tears, his soul conquered, and having divulged that the man responsible for the pignapping is none other than Amir’s father, the city’s go-to fine-foods dealer Darius (Adam Arkin).

Finally they visit Darius, whose trim salt-and-pepper beard is the tidiest thing in the whole movie. Darius, it turns out, has had Rob’s pig stolen in an effort — I think I have this right — to dissuade his son from entering the business because ... it gets murky here, but ... Darius’s wife had tried to commit suicide, is now in a vegetative state, and Darius’s heart has hardened to the extent that he steals this pig in order to persuade his son to take a desk job. I don’t know. I’m also not sure, to be honest, why, even if that were the case, stealing Rob’s pig is the move since he also offers to give Rob $20,000 to buy another pig, in which case, wouldn’t he just get another pig? Again, I don’t know. I gave up trying to root out the logic in the film. Not all of us are as talented as truffle-hunting pigs.

Obviously, art reserves the right to unmoor itself from reality. Not everything must be mimetic. But if the work in question — be it prose or painting or play or film — chooses to sail into the uncharted waters of abstraction, it should then abide by its own internally consistent set of rules. A work of art doesn’t need to be real, but it needs to be real to itself. And here is where the film falters.

Pig stumbles through satire, thriller, and meditative character study. Its stance, vis-a-vis the world it creates, is inconstant and its narrative incoherent. Whom do we hold in compassion and whom in contempt? What is meant to be risible and what saturnine?

Then there are the narrative inconsistencies that seem unrealistic in a non-mindful way. The veneration in which Rob is held is so wildly overstated it can’t help but distract. (Even the triumphant return of Rob’s closest IRL analogue, Jeremiah Tower, was met with only with a few headlines and shoulder shrugs.) That restaurant workers lacking health insurance would risk loss of income with bare-knuckled fighting seems unlikely. (They don’t even wear mouthpieces.) That a specialty food kingpin is a nefarious, and potentially murderous, villain is silly. Living, breathing women are all but absent from the film. Also, why doesn’t Nic Cage wash his face or take off his fingerless gloves like, ever? Why does Amir fall so quickly into this quest with Rob? What is the motivation? Narrative expediency is not a sufficient response.

There’s a lot of fatuous poppycock from a culinary perspective, too. For instance, Cage is obsessed with finding a salted baguette, made by the baker (a woman the film doesn’t deign to light sufficiently, played by October Moore) who used to work at his restaurant, Hestia. (All of the film’s three acts have food-inspired titles. This takes place in the third act: “A Bottle, A Bird, A Salted Baguette.”) But what the fuck is a salted baguette? Or, more saliently, what baguettes do not have salt in them? This makes about as much sense as Rob’s haughty discourse on the unreality of both critics and customers. “They aren’t real!” he tells Finway, as if the work of a chef takes place in a vacuum. What solipsistic onanism is this?

There are, to be clear, moments of emotional beauty and visual pleasure. There is a sublimity in Cage’s mopeyness and some serious Young Brando vibes in Wolff’s vulnerability. Portland appears in its foggy, gloomy glory, though the same cannot be said of its restaurant scene, which is all but obscured.

Even with the liberties it takes, Pig has some good food moments, too. The culinary apex of the film hinges on Rob preparing a dish he served to Darius and his wife at his restaurant many years ago. Tasting the dish again softens Darius’s villainous heart, allowing him to finally reveal the full story of what happened to the goddamn pig. It hardly matters.

The cooking sequence, featuring both Rob and Amir working in Darius’s home kitchen, is well shot. There is much sniffing of thyme, mandolining of chanterelles, and searing of pigeon. The affect is heightened, but the verisimilitude is absolute. (Chef Gabriel Rucker of Portland’s Le Pigeon was Cage’s guide in this .) What makes this sequence so lovely is the way it shows how cooking can be both grounded and sublime, fantastical and methodical, disciplined and disruptive at once. It can, in short, be everything that Pig isn’t.

Joshua David Stein is the co-author of The Nom Wah Cookbook and Il Buco: Stories & Recipes , and the memoir Notes from a Young Black Chef with Kwame Onwuachi. He is the author of six children’s books, most recently The Invisible Alphabet , with illustrations by Ron Barrett, and the forthcoming cookbook Cooking for Your Kids: At Home with the World’s Greatest Chefs. Follow him on Instagram at @joshuadavidstein.

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All about ‘pig’: the nicolas cage movie about truffles, chefs, and a stolen pig.

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‘Pig’ Film Review: Nicolas Cage Cooks Up One of His Finest Performances in Gourmet Vengeance Tale

Michael Sarnoski’s tale of a reclusive ex-chef out to retrieve his porcine pal mixes flavors you wouldn’t think would pair well, but they do

Two-thirds of the way into “Pig,” the offbeat feature debut from director Michael Sarnoski, Nicolas Cage sits at a prestigious restaurant in Portland, bloodied and in rags. It’s the kind of eatery that earns awards and praise, an establishment that prides itself in its outrageously overpriced micro-creations and deconstructions only a few a can afford, and even fewer can pronounce, but whose status make patrons near and far salivate for a reservation.

Playing Robin Feld, a venerated chef that quit the culinary business 15 years ago to live in the forest, Cage harshly judges such food as nothing more than pretentious, nourishing neither soul nor senses but feeding into a vicious cycle of false appearances. With contained authority, his imputation forces the man behind the dish to reconsider his path.

That scene serves as the main dish of a three-course cinematic meal that’s as unexpected as it’s a strangely poignant. “Pig” is a quest with an aftertaste that’s indescribable but pleasant. Not all the ingredients make sense together, but the product of their intermingling inside the filmmaker’s narrative pot render a special concoction. The recipe feels as if the documentary “The Truffle Hunters” was mixed with a pinch of “Fight Club” and just a dash of the hunger for vengeance in the Cage-starring gory thriller “Mandy.”

As a character, hermit Robin leans into Cage’s strength for stoicism. Silent other than when speaking to his precious porcine companion, a pig trained to find truffles in the Pacific Northwest greenery, this is a man who has sworn off all the comforts and hypocrisies of communal living. His only bridge to the outside world is young truffle dealer Amir (Alex Wolff), a character that initially feels disposable but soon surfaces as the film’s emotional anchor.

One random night, Rob’s antisocial lifestyle is upended when his beloved hog is stolen through violence. Furious, he coerces Amir to take him to the city to dig up answers. Back in the underbelly of Oregon’s restaurant industry, populated with clandestine dealings and vicious kingpins, the formerly renowned cook puts his own flesh on the line in exchange for clues. Sarnoski pushes the boundaries of realism ever so slightly for us to comprehend this is a realm of heightened viscerality where no one bats an eye at Rob’s pummeled face.

Cage is measured, perhaps even a bit comfortable in a role that knows how to utilize him, but for that, not any less magnetic to the eye. “Pig” also attests that when the Cage’s raw command of a scene is paired with the proper elements and a director that can deftly manipulate tone to the actor’s advantage, excellence arises. Wolff, best known for “ Hereditary ,” continues adding credibility to his developing career. In the body of insecure Amir, a kid in adult clothing driving a flashy car and desperate for his cold-hearted father’s approval, the young actor once again flaunts his knack for guarded vulnerability.

Some notes are less invigorating, like the facile trope of a dead spouse — it’s not only overused as the force to ignite a man’s desire for change or retaliation, but even within Cage’s own filmography, it’s a repeated motivation in the characters he chooses to play. But that doesn’t spoil the whole; the philosophical marinade Sarnoski drenches his screenplay with is plenty delicious. The writing is at its freshest when Rob pontificates about the insignificance of human plights against the brutality of Mother Nature or in the putative father-son relationship between him and Amir.

Auspiciously, the writer-director aims for a noticeable synergy between form and content. Just as the flavor profile of the plot begins to show its layers, so does the shape-shifting score by Alexis Grapsas and Philip Klein. Early on the music rings of mystery and anticipation, and as “Pig” transitions into more humanistic drama, the melody follows suits turning tender, even soothing.  

Images of Rob reconnecting with people from his bygone life are captured in wide shots, amplifying the distance he’s deliberately created between those days and his current solitude. When he is cooking, however, cinematographer Patrick Scola (“Monsters and Men”) gets in there with him, almost like a cameraman in a Food Network competition, capturing the rosemary falling on a piece of chicken in slow motion. The intentionality of the overall craft dazzles, such as when an unhurried pan through Rob’s abode tells us so much about him without words.  

It’s mostly through what others utter about him that we get snippets of Rob’s past, yet Sarnoski is close-fisted with exposition. At first the obscurity of Rob’s glory days and the events that led to his isolation might frustrate, but ultimately the enigma elevates our immersion into this pessimistic man’s search for an animal that personifies his need for connection.

Cage leaves behind the blade and the guns so often employed in his movies and instead takes to the kitchen knife and the pan. Sarnoski makes a case for the value of an experience without defaulting to placing food porn in front of us. In fact, the dishes themselves are never center stage; what they evoke in us is what’s celebrated, a memory that comes through our taste buds and reaches the heart. To write of such vivid storytelling in a movie with this premise is truly a rewarding surprise.

A hefty order of longing served with a side of crime thrills, “Pig” is flavorful, fascinating and fancy, crafted by someone who knows how to create a dish that’s accessible yet undeniably gourmet in its complexity.

“Pig” opens in theaters Friday.

Movie Review: 'Pig' Is Truly One Of The Best Movies Of The Year

I’ve seen one of the best movies of the year, although I wonder if you won’t think I’m serious when I tell you what it is. The movie is Pig , and it stars Nicolas Cage as a reclusive truffle hunter, whose truffle pig is stolen in a nighttime home invasion, and who sets out to find the people responsible.

Now, at this point, we’re primed to expect certain things from this setup and this star—after all, we’re living in a post- John Wick world, and Cage has spent the last decade or so of his career putting out a handful of movies a year that let him go wild, not that some of them haven’t been very good.

But it’s clear director Michael Sarnoski and his cowriter Vanessa Block are well aware of the baggage we’re bringing to this movie, and they brilliantly confound our expectations. In fact, every time we got to a point where I thought, “ok, here we go,” well… there we went, in another direction entirely. But it’s not just about expectations: so many pieces of this movie could have been played wrong, but Sarnoski gets them exactly right. What Pig does, so impressively, is become a movie about loss, a movie about how we understand and cope with that loss, about how we struggle with the impermanence of all things, about how we create and find meaning in our lives, and about memory and our connection to it—crucially, in that last case, through the influence of our senses. As someone whose love language is food, I found the way the movie shows that relationship to be deeply affecting. In fact, there’s one scene in particular-- one line, even-- when I could physically feel the movie elevate, and from there, it continues to rise. Cage, for his part, is gorgeously understated, carrying a pain we don’t know, but that bleeds from his pores.

And here I suspect you still don’t believe me about Pig . No matter. You’ll see it for yourself and you’ll realize that it’s a far more profound experience than you’re imagining, and that it truly is one of the best movies of the year.

Pig is in theaters July 16

• Entertainment
• In <i>Pig</i>, Nicolas Cage Plays a Grouchy, Meditative Hermit—and Gives His Best Performance in Years

In Pig , Nicolas Cage Plays a Grouchy, Meditative Hermit—and Gives His Best Performance in Years

A t one time—the era of Moonstruck, of Leaving Las Vegas, of Wild at Heart —many people thought Nicolas Cage was the greatest living American actor. Then, perhaps as a means of financing his purchase of multiple castles, he began accepting roles indiscriminately and performing in them indifferently. His huge international bankability as an action star probably didn’t help—all he really had to do was show up and collect the money. It became hard to have any idea of who this performer—this habitual maker of questionable choices—actually was. It became harder to love him.

A pig now brings the old Nicolas Cage back to us. In Pig, a strange and wonderful movie as direct as its stubby little title, Cage plays a hermit, a woolly mammoth of a man who lives alone, or nearly alone, in the woods of the Pacific Northwest. His only companion, the only one he cares to have, is a truffle-hunting pig whose name we never learn, if she even has one. The movie’s first eight minutes or so establish the warmth of this duo’s relationship. With her gentle snuffling, the pig helps the man locate truffles as the sun streams through the cathedral of conifers around them. Her fur is red and surprisingly soft-looking; she has a swingy, tassel-capped tail. Back at his ramshackle little hut, our disheveled loner rewards her with a nicely prepared dinner of something-or-other. He makes a little tart for himself, folding nubs of hard butter into a pile of flour, a few granules of which float down around his pig comrade’s radiant, upturned face like a benediction. The very beginning of Pig is so tranquil and restorative you might wish it could go on forever, or somehow be repackaged as a sleep aid, a sort of visual lullaby to calm a racing brain. (The cinematographer here is Patrick Scola.)

But Pig is actually a thriller, of sorts—at least until it twists and becomes something else, a sort of guidebook for really thinking about the shape you want your life to take. Our hermit—we’ll later learn his name is Rob—trades his truffles for necessary goods. His dealer is a wanna-be slickster who shows up at Rob’s door in a yellow Camaro, his Gucci buckle glinting obviously in the sunlight, an affront to all that is decent and good. Amir (Alex Wolff) is just trying to get ahead in the truffle-dealing world, for reasons that will become clear later. His exchanges with Rob are terse to the point of being hostile.

And so, when Rob’s adored companion is pignapped one night, Amir doesn’t have much interest in helping, though Rob, distraught and angry, persuades him with an authoritative growl. Amir and Rob make a journey to the city, meaning Portland . Amir knows so little about Rob, other than that he supplies superior truffles.

(An alert for animal lovers, and please note that what follows is a spoiler, so skip this part if you’re so inclined: The pignapping sequence is the most upsetting scene in the movie, and though it’s discreet and mercifully brief, the pig does not get the happy ending you might hope for. But there is no on-camera or prolonged distress. Her demise is treated respectfully, and she’s mourned appropriately. Watch, or not, according to your own judgment.)

But as they search for the lost pig, bits of Rob’s past life come together like a mosaic. He wasn’t always an unkempt, crabby mountain man. In a past life he knew people, important people in the food world. Something has happened to push him out of that world—there’s some painful experience he’s burying—but he also has an exceptionally strong sense of himself. At one point, Rob questions a man who has built a lucrative empire making and selling things he doesn’t care about, warning him about the future that awaits: “Every day you wake up, there’ll be less of you.” He adds, “We don’t get a lot of things to really care about.”

Read more reviews by Stephanie Zacharek

This is primo Nicolas Cage dialogue, inquisitive and soul-deep, the kind of stuff he was born to say. To hear and watch him in this movie is like greeting an old friend. Pig seems to have come out of nowhere, but we’re lucky to have it. The director is Michael Sarnoski; it’s his first feature, co-written with one of the movie’s producers, Vanessa Block. Pig is about grief and our ability to live with it, even if we can never exactly recover from it. It’s about loss , but it also reminds us that people and animals we’ve loved stay with us always.

And Cage is something to watch, every minute. As Rob, he’s bearded and unkempt but still radiant, a messy movie Jesus. His face is streaked with blood from more than one recent violent encounter, and his eyes speak of nothing but a reluctant acceptance that there are no easy answers, for anything. He’s not exactly tortured, but he is quizzical, an eternal seeker of truth as well as truffles. He’s mostly in a bad mood—but not in the movie’s loveliest scene, where he treks to a modest craftsman-style house, a house he used to live in long ago, now owned by someone else. He moves closer to it, drawn by soft, percussive notes being played on an instrument he doesn’t recognize. There’s a little boy in the backyard, playing a handpan, a thing that looks like a small overturned bowl. He asks if Rob wants to try it; Rob taps out a few notes and lets the sound fill him—Cage lets us see the sound filling him. This is a man making peace with his past, finding the portal via a sound he’s just learned to make. Pig is about a man and his pig, but it’s also about the process of making a life, one sound at a time, as you feel your way along. You may feel wise one minute, only to realize in the next that you’re completely lost. That’s your cue to listen for a sound you’ve never heard, and follow it. And if it means selling a castle or two, so be it.

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Nicolas Cage has appeared in a lot of movies with rocky critical receptions, but his latest release  Pig   has received largely positive reviews. Critics have praised Cage's performance as a former elite chef turned recluse, along with the efforts of first-time director Michael Sarnoski and the film's patient writing. For many,  Pig  is a reminder of why Cage is such a fascinating actor despite the unevenness of his work.

Pig  begins as a somewhat meditative account of a man's relationship with his pet pig, with Cage starring as the bearded and mysterious Rob. When the pig is stolen, Rob must team up with ambitious food supplier Amir (played by Alex Wolff) and return to the underworld of Portland's culinary scene. The plot has drawn comparisons to the  frequently imitated  John Wick , but  Pig 's focus is less on high-stakes action and more on Rob's character.

RELATED:  How Nic Cage's Villain Can Return For Face/Off 2 (Despite Being Dead)

This pacing and style are more similar to arthouse films than either action blockbusters or the B-movies that Cage often appears in. The movie avoids conventional narrative satisfaction and catharsis as it gradually reveals more about Rob's world. Critics appreciate  Pig 's   pacing and focus on characters.

Chicago Sun-Times  writes:

“Pig” is not a revenge film, nor is it the most compelling mystery in the world, though we care greatly about the fate of that poor creature, and we do eventually find out what happened to her. It’s a rustic, poetic, occasionally funny, sometimes heartbreaking and wonderfully strange and memorable character study of a man who is in such tremendous pain he had to retreat from the world.

Rolling Stone  also praises  Pig 's unusual and imaginative depiction of the culinary world:

Amir and Rob become an unhappy couple, with the former stepping in — not exactly willingly — to help the latter. Because at the end of the day this is a business, and a lost pig spells trouble for them both. And so  Pig  descends, somewhat subversively, into an unexpected underground that, aside from Cage, is the best thing about the movie.

Nicolas Cage's star performance has been one of the biggest focuses of positive reviews. His character in  Pig  is more sensitive and wounded than angry, in line with other recent surreal Cage vehicles like  Mandy   and the underrated Lovecraft adaptation  The Color Out of Space .

The AV Club   singles out Cage's performance for praise:

None of this would work without Cage’s commitment to the idea of Rob as both arrestingly iconic and resolutely human. Few of the things Rob does are wholly credible—least of all his refusal to accept any treatment for his many wounds, just letting the blood dry and cake on his face throughout, undisturbed—but his emotions are so raw and forceful that they fling your disbelief skyward until it winds up in orbit, well out of your way.

The Film Stage  agrees:

It is remarkably intense, understated work, utilizing his potential to physically intimidate within the confines of a character who is fragile and just wants his friend back. The way his performance expands throughout the runtime is remarkable—he allows himself to openly reminisce and grieve before the inevitable shutdown comes. There are moments throughout  Pig  that rank amongst the best scenes he’s ever had as an actor, further revealing how much of a groundbreaking talent he is.

Writer and director Michael Sarnoski also receives credit for his cinematography and attention to detail. Critics enjoy the way Sarnoski depicts everything from fight scenes to meals with careful attention, to detail and draws out strong performances from both Cage and the less well-known supporting cast.

Sarnoski is often content to focus his camera on a small detail or glance, or to cut away right in the middle of a dramatic moment, as if trying to represent cinematically the mindfulness that Robin seeks, and that maybe he lost with the theft of his pig.

The Atlantic  also enjoys Sarnoski's work:

As Rob invades various Portland houses of haute cuisine   in search of his pig, the film turns into something of a food travelogue. The first-time writer-director Michael Sarnoski (who co-wrote the story with Vanessa Block) beautifully shoots each sumptuous meal that Rob and his nervy ally, Amir (Alex Wolff), take in as they search for Pig’s kidnapper.

Nicolas Cage is known for his intense and unique acting style, but many of his films have fared poorly with critics, such as the generally derided action-comedy  Willy's Wonderland .  Pig  bucks this trend by earning plaudits for Cage's performance as well as its pacing and direction. The movie has a 97% "Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a score of 82 on Metacritic, as well as high audience scores, suggesting that many viewers, as well as critics, enjoyed seeing Cage in this offbeat thriller.

Next:  Every Upcoming Nicolas Cage Movie & TV Show

• SR Originals

That’s Some ‘Pig’: A Big-Hearted Debut of Trauma and Truffles

Finally. ‘Ratatouille’ for depressed people.

Published July 12, 2021 Movies , Reviews By Meg Shields Disclaimer When you purchase through affiliate links on our site, we may earn a commission.

Uncynical movies feel very rare these days. Earnestly advocating for kindness and care isn’t always marketable. But that is, ultimately, the whole-hearted charm of Pig , a movie that marks the feature film debut of writer/director Michael Sarnoski . For all the hooting and hollering over its trailer promising John Wick meets Chef , its appetite is unexpectedly simple, and all the more powerful for it.

Robin ( Nicolas Cage ) lives off the grid in the dense brush of Oregon. His life is small, humble, and free from modern trappings. It’s an idyllic neo-frontier daydream of cast iron, weather-worn leather jackets, and rugged bare necessities. He doesn’t even have a watch. The most sophisticated piece of technology he owns is a battery-powered cassette player — an auditory portal to the past that drove him into the woods all those years ago.

He forages for truffles with his unnamed pig, a ruddy-colored angel — there’s no other word for her. She is a clear beacon of warmth and love in his life. And as much a work partner as a therapeutic companion with an ever-attentive ear. You immediately understand why she matters so much to him.

Despite the inferred tragedy that clearly still weighs heavy on Robin’s shoulders, it’s clear that he has carved out a space for himself that brings him peace and purpose, however modest. So when two masked figures burst through his cabin in the dead of night, knocking him cold and bagging the shrieking pig, the stakes are clear and unambiguous. He has to go get that pig back.

Robin’s quest forces him back into the world he severed ties with: a cutthroat restaurant scene where his name, somehow, still has power. Accompanied by Amir ( Alex Wolff ), his young reputation-obsessed truffle buyer turned reluctant chauffeur, Robin follows the trail through the city’s culinary underground — at times literally — digging through the mire of the scene’s moral rot with a singular purpose.

It is very easy to lean on Cage’s infamous wild-eyed machinations as a crutch, but even a five-course meal comprised entirely of five-hour energy drinks invariably grows stale. As Robin, the actor is gentle, tender, and tired. He’s an out-of-place soul contending with the cruelty and lack of care that colors the modern world.

An apocalyptic cloud hangs over Robin’s head. But his attitude towards the inevitable earthquake that will plunge much of the Pacific Northwest into the sea is more resigned than fearful. His past and future are marred with loss. Rather than lash out in anger, he has tried his best to cherish beautiful, lovable things.

I expect many reviews of Pig to resurrect Cage’s career-best turn in Mandy , wherein the actor, at least for the first half, appears unexpectedly soft-spoken and gentle. Apart from sharing an editor in the temperate, steady-handed Brett W. Bachman , I think comparisons to Mandy should stop there. The two movies have very different and indeed polar stances on the appropriate response to loss, but as far as underlining how magnificent, touching, and grounded Cage is in Pig , the resonance rings true.

And ultimately, the emotional journey of Pig is not Robin’s but Amir’s. His abrasive, big city callousness softens through exposure to Robin’s crystalline philosophy. Working in the shadow of his father ( Adam Arkin ), Amir is defined by superficial success markers and an anxious obsession with reputation and class.

Wolff often comes across as insubstantial compared to Cage. Whether this is by design or otherwise is hard to tell. Winning an audience over to a character initially introduced as annoying and crass isn’t easy. Amir shines more brightly in the movie’s latter moments. Ultimately, he endears himself when he begins to align himself to Robin’s frequencies.

A word of warning to those expecting Pig to trot to the beat of exploitation cinema: this is not a revenge movie. It contains some delightfully strange wrinkles that keep it in a bizarre space. Robin spends much of the time looking like he got hit by a truck. Seeing him wander through hoity-toity restaurants looking like the ghost of Christmas carnage is surreal and deeply funny.

However, due to its strange gait, I am not entirely sure for whom Pig is intended. I worry that genre geeks and Cage fans will be caught off guard by its whole-heartedness and humble scale. For everyone else, what will they make of the subterranean fight club for restaurant workers to let off steam?

All told, Pig marks a promising and impressive debut for Sarnoski, who will certainly be a creative voice worth keeping an eye on in the future. Praise is also due to Alexis Grapsas and Philip Klein ’s score, which is filled with tenebrous strings and melancholic guitars that endow the movie with an understated neo-Western undercurrent.

And yet for all its flirtations with more furious genre spaces, there is nothing triumphant or vindictive about Pig . This is a very small-feeling movie, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. One of its recurring themes is the transformative power of simple things made with love.

The movie is a lot like Robin’s cooking: slow, unpretentious, and mindful. It’s about finding authentic things worth caring about and doing your very best not to lose them. Of knowing what’s real and what isn’t. I can’t say that Pig is going to be to everyone’s taste, but those with an appetite for sweetness would do well to seek this movie out.

Tagged with: Alex Wolff Michael Sarnoski Nicolas Cage Pig

Meg Shields

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Pig Reviews

The beauty in Pig is that memory can be cruel, freeing, and redemptive all at once.

Full Review | Jul 3, 2024

Cage [gives] his best, most fully realized performance in decades.

Full Review | Feb 13, 2024

I missed seeing Pig on its original release, and that was my mistake. Do not make the same one. This is vital, unmissable cinema.

Full Review | Original Score: 10/10 | Sep 5, 2023

Cage elevates Sarnoski’s visuals. The actor is a vortex of emotions that quietly burn beneath a lonely exterior.

Full Review | Jul 27, 2023

PIG is ONE OF THE BEST FILMS OF 2021. It’s not Mandy, it’s not A John Wick Clone, it’s a somber, subdue, & profound film on the meaning in the meaningless of things to others & ourselves.

Full Review | Jul 26, 2023

Pig may not be for everyone, but it is still worth the watch. It is a gentle, slow-burn movie, that while not perfect and a bit messy in some places, is undeniably a great piece of cinema.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 25, 2023

Pig goes on a mission to redefine traditional masculine roles. There’s an unspoken vulnerability in it that employs unexpected methods and unmanly emotions to highlight something that’s inherently rooted in all men: tenderness.

Full Review | Jul 21, 2023

This is perhaps the most empathetic movie of the year, featuring characters with motivations that are clear and easy to understand while still holding plenty of subtle depth.

Full Review | May 1, 2023

Pig will haunt you and allow you to contemplate its rich themes if you allow yourself to open up to its cerebral style. In return for opening yourself up, Pig will indeed satisfyingly cleanse your cinephile palette.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 31, 2023

Debutante Sarnoski's austere and modest narrative drive is essential to Cage's luminous performance... [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 20, 2022

A rarity. One waits for a proverbial wink to let us know that we're experiencing a strange joke of a film. But the wink never arrives, and once we realize that this is a serious movie, we reach unthinkable dramatic levels. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Nov 16, 2022

This is Cage’s best performance in years... Pig takes the humblest ingredients and delivers a Michelin-star cinematic feast.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 12, 2022

Pig is a solemn yet subtly stirring character study that expertly subverts expectations, elevated by Nicolas Cage ’s best performance in nearly two decades.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 1, 2022

Sarnoski fully earns our empathy despite not fully satisfying our curiosity.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 17, 2022

Sarnoski skews from the customary revenge thriller and plays with the crazed image Cage has constructed in the past decade and a half to bring us something completely unexpected. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jul 15, 2022

Pig is proof that [Cage] is capable of elevating a film that many will come to watch expecting a good time and will be left with tears in their eyes. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 15, 2022

... With a cold mise en scene and a contemplative, sedated rhythm, Pig proves that there isn't a colder dish than a broken, lost soul. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 14, 2022

What gives this strange film most of its beauty, emotional brutality, and poignant power is Cage, whose work exudes mystery, and tenderness, and suppressed rage. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 14, 2022

It gives the impression that a good part of the film's findings are more found than really sought after, more chance than fair and accurate reflection. [Full review in Spanish]

[Nicolas Cage] brings a grace to his scenes in the kitchen, showing us a man whose respect for the raw materials of his dishes borders on spiritual and whose ease with the tools of the trade reveals a mastery born of experience.

Full Review | Jul 5, 2022

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Nicolas Cage's 'perfect performance' in Pig movie sniffs out his best reviews ever

The actor's oddball turn in the new John Wick-esque Pig movie notches his all-time best Rotten Tomatoes score.

Despite its absurd concept, Nicolas Cage 's latest movie is no cinematic swine; the actor's new thriller Pig has generated the best reviews of his career.

With a whopping 97 percent of 126 critics surveyed on Rotten Tomatoes giving the film a positive reaction, Pig — about a lonely truffle hunter who sets out to find the person who stole his titular companion — stands as the 57-year-old's top-performing movie of all time. Though anything with a rating of 6/10 or above counts as a "positive" score on the reviews aggregation site, Pig 's critical average stands at 8.2/10 at press time.

Globe and Mail writer Barry Hertz says that, in the film, Cage "offers something genuinely special: a perfect performance, and one which could not exist without every other performance that the actor has ever delivered," while FilmWeek 's Angie Han adds that the movie might seem like a bonkers romp on the surface, ends as a "surprisingly tender exploration of food, creative expression, and human connection."

Trailing Pig 's Rotten Tomatoes score among Cage's filmography are several classics, including Red Rock West (95 percent with an average score of 7.5/10), Moonstruck (94 percent with an average score of 7.9/10), and Face/Off (92 percent with an average score of 7.9/10).

Pig is now playing in select theaters.

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‘Pig’ Review: Nicolas Cage Shines in This Gentle and Somber Tale of a Fragile World

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This creepy, free-to-watch found footage horror movie was made for $800, the 42 best movies on amazon prime video right now (september 2024).

Nicolas Cage does a lot of bad movies that seem deeply questionable for a man who is not only a talented actor, but one who has been part of some of the greatest movies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. And yet when you see him leading films like Primal , Kill Chain , A Score to Settle , and Running with the Devil that all come out in a single year (2019) and evaporate as quickly as they hit VOD, you’re left to wonder what exactly he’s doing with his career other than cashing paychecks. And that’s a shame because then a film like Pig comes along and gets grouped into that kind of movie when it’s far more than its simple logline of “Reclusive man goes looking for his stolen pig.” Rather than the scenery-chewing Cage that folks claim they like to see, this is the Cage of quieter movies like Joe with a largely soft-spoken performance that shows Cage still knows how to bring it when the picture demands that kind of work from him. Michael Sarnoski ’s movie is a sad, melancholy affair of grasping for the last remnants of the things that matter in a world where we have so little to hang on to.

Rob (Cage) is a recluse living in the woods outside of Portland with his truffle-hunting pig. It’s a quiet existence where his only contact with the outside world is the brash, egotistical Amir ( Alex Wolff ), a young man who drives up in his bright yellow Camaro every Thursday to purchase truffles from Rob. In the middle of the night, unknown assailants break into Rob’s cabin, knock him out, and steal his pig. Bloody and beaten, Rob ventures out and requires Amir to be his ride. A reluctant Amir, who’s working to be a part of Portland’s restaurant scene and sees truffles as a valuable asset in that ascent, decides he has no choice to cart Rob around on his quest. As they go searching, Amir learns that Rob is far more than some hermit looking for a pig, and that his search isn’t just about looking for a creature that can dig up truffles.

RELATED: Why 'Joe' Is Nicolas Cage's Most Underrated Performance of the 2010s

I worry about a film like Pig because it’s technically a Nicolas Cage vehicle while being far different than most of his recent output. If I told someone the logline, I wouldn’t be surprised if they expected Cage to be shouting and beating people up looking for his pig. Basically, they would think it could be John Wick but a pig instead of a puppy. Pig is not that movie. Cage doesn’t punch anyone. He rarely raises his voice. Instead, Cage reminds us that while he can bring delightful lunacy in movies like Mandy , when he exercises restraint he can really burrow into a character as he does here. Rob is one of his more fascinating roles and the story of Pig isn’t so much about finding the pig (although that’s the plot that moves the story along) as much as it’s about Amir (and the audience) discovering what would drive someone like Rob to live removed from society while also feeling the need to break that seclusion to find a pig.

Sarnoski frames this quest beautifully with gorgeous cinematography that also highlights Rob’s psyche, particularly throught the motif of doorframes. Rob is a man who has consciously left a domestic, settled existence and chosen to live on a semblance of the frontier. His last human relationship is with Amir, and it’s a tenuous one where the two men don’t really know each other, and yet while Rob has utmost certainty in his current existence, Amir is constantly putting on a show to mask his own insecurities. This conflict further highlights Rob’s worldview as a man who can’t be part of our world because it’s simply too fleeting and he’s already lost what mattered most to him. As Pig unfolds, we can see that the pig is the last thing that Rob truly loves in this world and even that has been taken from him despite his simple existence. Pig is not a story of revenge, but one of loss.

Some may find Pig a disappointment because it’s not Cage going wild searching for a lost pig, but that would be a disservice to both Cage’s work here and Sanroski’s film overall. We need to make room for Cage still doing these kinds of roles and cheer for them when he does. There’s no sign Cage will stop doing his forgettable VOD work, and look, I’m not going to begrudge the man his money, especially when he still finds time to do good work like Pig , Mandy , and Joe . I’ll admit it’s weird to say, “The movie about Nicolas Cage looking for his lost pig made me sad and anxious about our fragile place in the world and forced me to look at what I truly value in a chaotic and unpredictable universe,” but that’s the truth. Pig is not the film we’ve come to expect from Cage these days. Thank goodness.

KEEP READING: ‘The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent,’ Starring Nic Cage as Nic Cage, Gets New Release Date

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Pig’ on Hulu, in Which Nicolas Cage Defies Expectations by Playing a Hobo Without a Shotgun

Where to stream:.

• Nicolas Cage

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Longlegs’ on VOD, an Unforgettable Serial Killer Horror-Thriller Starring a Never-Creepier Nicolas Cage

Is ‘longlegs’ based on a true story, new movies on streaming: 'inside out 2,' 'longlegs,' + more, 'longlegs' comes to digital, but will 'longlegs' be streaming on hulu.

Now on Hulu, director Michael Sarnoski’s debut feature Pig casts Nicolas Cage as a reclusive, and undoubtedly very very smelly, ex-chef who hunts truffles with his pet pig by day and retires to his windowless shack in the woods by night. This is the type of premise that has us Cageophiles — you know, we who struggle to narrow down our list of 10 favorite Cage movies — pumping an enthusiastic fist in anticipation. But this film is not at all keen on indulging our expectations, which ultimately is a good thing.

PIG : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Robin Feld — or Robin — make it just Rob (Cage) — kneels down, picks up some soil from the ground on the edge of his knife, and tastes it. Two minutes in, and Nicolas Cage is eating dirt. Rob’s funny little pig snorts and huffs; he digs a bit, and unearths a treasure, a black truffle. He sniffs it. Good job, pig. (That’ll do? That’ll do.) Back at camp, Rob presses scratch-made dough into a pie pan, and a poof of flour floats down to the pig, who adorably shakes it off. He chops mushrooms and sautees them in a cast iron pan, and soon bites from a wedge of what appears to be a savory succulent roasted earthy tart. He shares it with the pig. Our stomachs grumble.

The next day, Rob is mending a garment when we hear the rumble of a car engine accompanied by blaring classical music. Amir (Alex Wolff) gets out of his canary-yellow Camaro, tells the pig to get the F away and purchases a cooler full of truffles from Rob, who barely looks up from his needle and thread. He doesn’t hide his disdain from this obnoxious phony. Amir tries to chat — “Sure you don’t want one of those camp showers?” — and Rob grunts his replies. Rob’s hair is a shoulder-length tangle and his beard is unkempt and his clothing is permanently grubby and he tolerates Amir, because this business is surely a necessity. In the dead dark of that subsequent night, the pig seems spooked. Coyotes howl in the distance. The door bursts open and there’s a scuffle and voices and squealing, and then a clang and a thud as Rob and the camera hit the floor. He awakens, peels his face from a sticky patch of blood. The pig is gone. The door is propped open with his cast iron pan.

Rob doesn’t bother to wash the blood and filth from his face before he fails to start up a battered old truck and then hoofs it down the road to the nearest patch of civilization, a bar-restaurant we would’ve described as “rustic” before we saw how Rob lives. He asks for a woman who’s been dead for a decade, then asks to use the phone. Amir pulls up in his stupid-ass Camaro. He’s going to help Rob. He’s going to help Rob find his pig.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Please set aside your John Wick comparisons — that movie was about violent revenge, and this one isn’t. For a while, Pig is a Cageophile’s dream: What if Nic Cage was cast in First Cow ? And then it becomes something strange but meaningful like Krisha , and something that’s almost wholly its own thing.

Performance Worth Watching: This is Cage’s most assured, detailed and nuanced work since hardly anybody saw him in David Gordon Green’s extraordinary 2013 effort Joe . Cage’s muted, but fiery performance as a deeply grief-stricken man will easily rank among his best.

Memorable Dialogue: Cage cuts through the Earth’s crust with the incisive delivery of this line: “We don’t get a lot of things to really care about.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: The last Cage film I saw was Willy’s Wonderland , in which he played a silent-but-deadly man-slab who pummels the terrifying life out of haunted animatronic kiddie-arcade mascots. So much of his career in the last decade has seen him graduate from A-list Oscar winner to a strange neverland of such neo-grind junk — junk that sets expectations for Pig that Sarnoski shrewdly defies. Werner Herzog famously indulged Cage’s extremity for an outrageously eye-bulging performance in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans ; Pig is its flip side, Cage playing a bottled-up character who seems primed to explode, and just… doesn’t . Sure, he enjoys an outburst or two, not to entertain us, but because Rob is subject to the compulsions of his raw humanity. He’s vulnerable, not volatile.

But Rob is extraordinary, a former superstar of cuisine in Portland, Oregon, where his name carries significant weight even a decade-and-a-half after he disappeared into the forest. (Apropos of nothing, save for maybe the advancement of the plot, he also has a photographic memory.) His status allows him to navigate the weird underworld of the city’s culinary scene, where, in the movie’s strangest moments, restaurant workers venture into an underground basement and bet on how long a homeless man will remain standing as he’s beaten by an angry sous chef or server or busboy.

Sarnoski cultivates an odd heightened reality in which Rob, the hobo without a shotgun, can wield his influence, often by slashing through superficiality with a vengeance. Amir shares details about his dysfunctional relationship with his father, a local “rare foods king” who carries himself like a don, and Rob replies by painting a vivid picture of Portland’s inevitable demise by earthquake and tsunami: None of this matters. Rob meets a former kitchen employee who’s now the chef at a trendy restaurant with an absurd high concept, and this poor man, who pursued commercial success over his passion, can only stammer a reply through a pained, fake smile. Cage doesn’t need to wield his action-movie fists. Here, his intensity is channeled through apocalyptic speeches delivered with measured, clarified rage. He’s very quietly terrifying — but we know better. Credit Cage’s performance for that.

Pig ’s slippery tone and episodic plotting may not appeal to everyone’s cinematic palate. The film is dramatically gripping and subtly funny, an odd melange of character study, cultural satire, B-revenge flick and buddy comedy (Cage and Wolff enjoy some nicely understated crazy old coot/clueless upstart chemistry). But its eccentricities — and the occasional what-do-you-make-of-THAT moment — turn the dramatic familiarities of people working through grief and depression into a much more distinctive, memorable and emotionally resonant story. I’ll quote Rob again: “We don’t get a lot of things to really care about.” That’s it. That’s the point. That’s the truth.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Pig is one of the year’s best films.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba .

Where to stream Pig

• Stream It Or Skip It

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