As do many new directors nowadays, Carlota Pereda expands on a previously made short subject for her feature debut. That short was also titled Piggy, and was about a teen living in a provincial Spanish town who is relentlessly teased and bullied by her peers because of her weight. The short focuses on an isolated incident. The girl goes to the public swimming pool during an hour when few people are using it. The only person there is a male stranger (Richard Holmes), who mostly ignores her. However, while she’s in the pool, some classmates sneak in and steal her clothes, forcing her to walk home only in her swimsuit. While escaping some male tormentors she comes across a white van on a side road. Her classmates are locked inside, screaming, the man from the pool at the wheel. He looks at her and gives her her clothes before driving away.

The feature makes a thriller out of this premise—the man in the van turns out to be a serial killer, but only our protagonist, Sara (Laura Galán), knows about this once bodies start turning up and the girls in the van are reported missing. There’s a kind of secret sharer quality to Sara’s behavior that’s a mixture of curiosity and gratitude, which only intensifies when other people in town suspect she knows something about the killings and disappearances but won’t say anything. As it turns out, Sara’s home life is no more tolerable than her so-called social life. Though her equally overweight father dotes on her to a certain extent, her mother is critical to a fault, thus providing a more accessible target for Sara’s incipient rage at the hand life has dealt her. Pereda teases the slasher possibilities of the story by making the family business a butcher shop (Sara always seems to have a bit of blood on her) and hinting that Sara is skilled with a hunting rifle. She also plays up the sexual angle by showing Sara indulging in porn, which seems more a reaction to loneliness than horniness. In the end, she can’t articulate her attraction to the deadly stranger because she’s so caught up in her own resentments, and as a result more people may die.

The local distributor is promoting Piggy as a kind of transgressive horror film, and I went into it thinking that Sara would turn out to be some kind of avenging psychopath, but it’s not that at all. On the other hand, it isn’t the off-beat psychological drama that Pereda obviously intended, and while I appreciated the occasional comic relief (Sara’s attempts to steal her father’s cell phone while he’s drinking beer and watching TV is pretty hilarious), the juxtaposition of the various set pieces is handled clumsily, and as a result the violent payoff, while clever, doesn’t provide much satisfaction. It’s an impressive first feature without being a very suspenseful thriller.

In Spanish. Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670). 

Piggy home page in Japanese

photo (c) Morena Films-Backup Studio-Francesca