Critic Reviews

Sarnoski’s debut is a scintillating tone poem about the inextricable links between love, creativity, and commerce, and what happens when the latter encroaches too much upon the former.

At a time when so many people are struggling to find something of value in their lives, when people are fleeing jobs, cities, futures they thought they wanted, Cage has crafted a quiet soliloquy about grasping on to something that has meaning. In some ways, this is one of his most emotionally brutal films.

Like the animal itself, Pig is considerably smarter and more ardent than it appears at first glance, and unearths treasures that are barely evident on the surface level. We’d have settled for much less, but what a rare treat to be offered a great deal more.

It's attentive to regret and failure in ways that American films tend to avoid for fear of bumming viewers out and making them warn other people not to watch the movie. And it seems to understand the way people mythologize others and themselves, and the reasons it happens.

Like the character at the heart of Pig — who is not, as it turns out, a pig at all, even metaphorically — it is smoldering and gentle.

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.

The film built around the actor’s affecting turn works equally hard at upending expectations.

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.

Pig subverts the expectations of the average revenge-thriller and accentuates the deep emotional scars that often underscore these stories. It features a measured, meticulous performance from Nicolas Cage.

Pig, Michael Sarnoski’s stunningly controlled first feature, is a mournful fable of loss and withdrawal, art and ambition.