92 min | R | July 16, 2021 | Neon
Rob Feld lives alone in the Oregon woods with a truffle pig and a buried past, until thieves take the animal and he walks back into Portland to find it. You brace for a revenge thriller. What arrives is a reckoning about the lives we settle for.
Rob Feld forages truffles in the Oregon wilderness. He lives in a cabin with no electricity and one companion, a foraging pig that finds the truffles he sells to a young supplier from the city. Two men break in at night and take the animal. Rob follows the trail back to Portland, a city he abandoned years ago. Pig wears the costume of a revenge thriller and refuses to behave like one. The film is about grief and the question of whether anything we love survives the people who profit from it.
Nicolas Cage plays Rob Feld with a stillness the actor rarely permits himself. He spends much of the film bloodied and silent, and he lets the silence carry the weight. When Rob finally speaks at length, in a restaurant scene that guts a former line cook, Cage delivers a monologue about authenticity that lands like a verdict. Alex Wolff plays Amir, the supplier, as a young striver who mistakes ambition for identity. Wolff gives him a brittle confidence that cracks a little more in every scene. Adam Arkin plays Amir’s father Darius with a cold gravity that explains the son without excusing him.
Michael Sarnoski directs his first feature and writes the screenplay from a story he developed with Vanessa Block. He structures the film in three titled chapters built around food, which turns a search for a pig into a meditation on memory and taste. The cinematography keeps to low light and shallow focus, so the forest and the city both feel like places half remembered. The camera holds on Cage’s ruined face longer than comfort allows. A spare, mournful score fills the gaps where a thriller would stage action. Sarnoski trusts quiet, and the restraint never reads as timidity.
Pig takes a premise that promises violence and answers it with conversation. Rob does not want vengeance. He wants to understand why people abandon the things that once meant everything to them, and he forces everyone he meets to face that question. The film argues that a life of compromise is its own kind of theft. Sarnoski builds a small, sad, beautiful movie around a man who refuses to compromise and pays for it. That refusal is the whole point.