At the highest intensity, Piglet—A thriller from Spanish director Carlota Pereda that opens in select theaters on Friday and worldwide on October 14 — almost as enthralled by the bodily devastation as the Saw film. However, Pereda’s biggest win is the film’s brutal bullying scenes.
Sara (Laura Galán), the film’s teenage protagonist, faces relentless bullying from everyone in her orbit — from her judgmental mother to slim teenage girls. . Even as Sara’s nightmare of revenge culminates in bloody climax, the cruelty of her bullies is the most prominent in her mind.
Sara’s bullies first found her at her father’s butcher shop in Extremadura, where she used to work. One of the girls, Claudia (Irene Ferreiro), seems reluctant to join the atrocity but never stands up to it. However, the harassment escalates when the group finds Sara at the local swimming pool. Their ringleader, Maca (Claudia Salas), Sara nearly drowns Sara with her swimming net as she pushes her head into the water, constantly chuckling. Forced to walk home in a small bathing suit after the girls stripped her of her clothes, Sara’s afternoon became even more traumatic when a group of young men attacked her and tried to run her in a car. their.
The sounds Galán makes in these scenes are almost animalistic when they’re suffering. Her body seemed to burst into flames and freeze in an instant as she clutched her arms, torso, unflattering bikini top. It’s a desperate search for something, someone — anyone — to hold onto, but in the end, all she can find is herself. Sara was so stunned on the walk home that she barely noticed that her bullies had been caught in a van. When she looks up and sees the desperate girls (and the man who captured them), she makes a surprising decision: She turns away and lets him drive with them.
PigletThe sexiest scenes capture the psychological effects of bullying at their most visceral. Sara radiates with the panic-stricken energy of a trapped animal as she moans, convulses and sobs at the torment that everyone around her doesn’t want to see or understand. With shame and scorn by seemingly everyone around her, even her mother, Sara protects herself by hiding herself. She eats snacks in her room so no one can see and she doesn’t tell anyone what she saw that day at the pool — even as the girls’ family went crazy. search for them.
In Spain, like everywhere else, the female body is a political battlefield. At the beginning of the film, we observe Sara walking by a sign that reads “Todo por la patria” – this slogan is derived from Francisco Franco’s 1936 fascist coup. Catholicism was paramount to Franco’s New Spain. Women are expected to be modest in dress—Bikini will become a main battlefield in the 1950s — and physical education became an essential tool to ensure Hispanic women would “not mothers for their fatherland. “Many signs of femininity, like stockings, will be out of reach for women below a certain socioeconomic class.
By including that tagline at the beginning of the film, Pereda (who also wrote the screenplay) may be insidiously alluding to the systemic cruelty that underlies Sara’s bullies — a system The oppressive system is, above all, based on sowing division and making scapegoats for those who fall outside of an arbitrary “norm”. Sara isn’t the docile body type known for awards, and her status as a butcher’s daughter further alienates her bullies, whose families also appear to be wealthy. have more.
Rare tender moments in Piglet, but at its most vulnerable, the film can lose its effect as if it were twisted. When Sara finally confronts her bully kidnapper, she seems to intuitively know that he won’t hurt her. For some reason she couldn’t grasp, this murderous man – and no one else – was on her side. He looked at her with surprised eyes, and as they hid together in the dark, he touched his lips and breathed out her name in a whisper – a voluptuous moment she would later imagine when masturbating beneath her sheets (and under the watchful eye of a small statue of the Virgin Mary).
Pereda maintains a frenetic pace throughout the film and avoids doctrinal pitfalls that can drag down even the best conceived social thrillers. Confident, impressive and tense to the very end, Piglet is a fascinating demonstration of how brutal humans can be — especially against those they perceive to be less than human.
