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by Cláudio Alves

Somewhere in the Spanish countryside, in a small town of Extremadura, Sara lives the kind of earthly hell familiar to many of those who grew up as fat teens. Judgment comes from every direction, shame inflicted upon her until it curdles the spirit. It's not just strangers that hurt, for a casual remark from one's mother can be so lacerating it leaves a scar. Still, there's nothing worse for Sara than her peers, cruel kids who couch their hatred in vacuous assertions that they mean well, that it's for her own good. A trip to the pool for Sara becomes another opportunity for torment at the hands of mean girls, including former friends.

Nearly drowned, her clothes stolen, a humiliated Sara walks home half-naked under the summer sun. It's then that a mysterious van appears, looming ominous in her path. Inside, the girl's tormentors lay powerless, victimizers turned victims at the hands of a kidnapper cum killer. Sara sees it all, the man in charge sees her, and they both do nothing – the van drives away…

That's the short story of Carlota Pereda's Goya-winning 14 minute film Cerdita (2018) which the director has now adapted into a full feature, Piggy (2022). The title comes from the vicious nickname attributed to the protagonist.

The beginning of both films is similar to the point of indistinguishability but the feature continues the tale after Sara's first encounter with the killer, exploring the possibilities of its premise, both as a character study and horror. We witness more of the anti-heroine's day-to-day struggles, the broad community that contextualizes her existence, and, most fascinating of all, the connection established between her and the murderer.

It's a fucked-up story, for sure - I loved it! 

Part of it was probably a matter of identification. It wouldn't be too far-fetched to say I've been through many of the same everyday horrors Sara endures as a fat individual in a profoundly fatphobic society. Moreover, the specificities of being a teenager in a larger body present in Piggy are visceral to the point of nausea, awakening dormant memories that quickly come to the surface like bubbles of oil in water. Let's say I could relate perhaps a bit too much with the pool humiliation, the insults, and the physical threat followed by stolen clothes to force the unwilling exposing of naked flesh to unkind eyes. More importantly, perhaps, I recognized the hatred that builds up within oneself, directed both inwards and outwards, a corrosive force of immense power.

The general public's disgust becomes internalized, held on as an absolute truth that makes one's physical being something to loathe, to disassociate from in a desperate attempt to divorce the inner self from what others see. But there's a slight paradox in all this. As much as you get browbeaten into believing exterior judgment, you also resent those that beat you down. Odious feelings are a perpetual presence, barbed shackles with spikes digging into your body and other sharp ones pointed out so that they can be weapons of defense and attack as much as tools for self-flagellation. In other words, putting myself in Sara's shoes, thinking back to the mindset of a hurt teenager, I can't be sure I wouldn't have let the van drive away too.

It's an upsetting thought, salt rubbed over an open wound, but that's Piggy. Pereda's film isn't for everyone, positing moral quandaries, avenging desires, violent ideations within the heightened precepts of scary stories and teen drama. It's grizzly and often merciless, wantonly grotesque when it's willing to go beyond the conventional paradigms of good taste and dive deep into matters of fetishization and the developing lusts of adolescence. Through such Grand Guignol mechanisms, the film evokes discomforting feelings like the best examples of its genre, putting forward questions that each viewer must answer in the privacy of their own conscience. Good horror films reveal what we find scary about the world while also shining a light on what we fear in ourselves, a funhouse mirror made of blood-tempered glass.

And yet, to characterize Pereda's work as an exercise in unnerving excess doesn't feel quite right. Watching both versions of Piggy, one is struck by the director's discipline, be it in the reveal of a dead body at the bottom of the pool or how she frames Sara. Though it explores the vicissitudes of hated bodies, the film never becomes an example of body horror or even an exploitative experience. While the camera doesn't shy away from examining how others see Sara, its aesthetic baseline is attuned to the experience of being looked upon rather than that of those who look. Such ideas can be anathema to cinema, but Pereda pulls it off, making a film about the pain of shame that doesn't become complicit in shaming its characters.

Piggy is currently in theaters, on a limited release, before it drops on VOD later this week, October 14th.

I heard great things about this and I do want to see this.

When do we get this in the uk,The b/f is a foreign film nut since Netflix.