Film Review: Adam Mason’s ‘Pig’
Pig (2010)
Directed by: Adam Mason
Starring: Andrew Howard, Molly Black, Juliet Quintin-Archard
Review by: Kayley Viteo
Horror films are about pushing boundaries – I think we can all agree on that. Having grown up on these films and being the type of girl to gleefully seek out Cannibal Holocaust and other glorious nasties, it isn’t too easy to shock me. So it was pretty surprising to settle in to watch Pig and find it so difficult to sit through.
Pig is as simple as you can get, but manages to be shockingly unique in the way that it flows because the film is broken up into just three scenes. There’s the typical storyline of a psychopathic family – abducting young people and doing truly awful things to them in the woods – but what makes this film so atypical and original is how it is constructed. Seventy minutes of this ninety minute film was all shot in a single take. And no, I’m not kidding.
Pig is hard to watch for a number of reasons. First, Adam Mason, the director, seems to be daring himself at how far he can take the story and what results is all manner of violence and depravity. That kind of brutalism in a film that never breaks itself up is mentally exhausting. Halfway through the film I found myself glancing at the clock, shocked it wasn’t almost over. It just stretches on and on, daring you to keep watching as violence just gets worse and you start to wonder exactly where the film can possible go.
One of my pet peeves while watching horror films is when the dialogue gets too comical. When juxtaposed with the violence, it comes off tacky and almost like the violence isn’t that serious. Regrettably, that happens a few times here and unfortunately, it makes the film feel long and stretched too thin. I’m not sure how much of a script there actually was given the fact that so much of the film is a single take, so I can’t imagine that all of it was scripted. Because of that, I can forgive the actors straying into cheesy and melodramatic territory on occasion.
Barring these dialogue issues, the only real problem I have with Pig is the ending. Whereas the film starts and thrives on its simple premise, the ending feels melodramatic and like it was tacked on, and too much like a weak final shot to the gut.
That all being said, this film is quite the creative achievement – I can honestly say I’ve never seen an American horror film quite like it and for that reason alone, it is worth a viewing. Mason doesn’t just break boundaries, he seems to happily ignore and demolish them.
Some will hate Pig, and some will praise it for its innovative style of filmmaking. And some, like me, will find themselves somewhere in between – although I did watch it twice, which might tell you something. However, what I really like is the potential Pig and The Devil’s Chair represent for future films by Mason. I find his filmmaking style to be unique, clever, and you can tell that he’s just as much a fan of the genre as the rest of us are, daring himself (and his viewers) with each of his successive films. I don’t agree with all of his choices (and have been outspoken about my dislike for his first film Broken), but I love that nothing is ever what I expect. When everything seems to be a remake or utterly derivative, I’m not going to pass up on something like Pig and you shouldn’t either.
