Nicolas Cage goes searching for his porcine pal… | Little White Lies

Incoming

Nico­las Cage goes search­ing for his porcine pal in the Pig trailer

18 Jun 2021

Words by Charles Bramesco

A bearded man with long hair sitting on the floor, looking pensive, with a pig nearby in a cluttered shed.
A bearded man with long hair sitting on the floor, looking pensive, with a pig nearby in a cluttered shed.
In Michael Sarnoski’s low-key debut, the Cage takes revenge on the exploita­tive food industry.

In the same respect that we mere mor­tals can nev­er tru­ly know the mind of God, we can only make our best sur­mise as to why Nico­las Cage takes the roles that he does. The actor must get a lot of scripts – and due to fis­cal con­straints in his own life, he takes on more of them than most – but it’s impos­si­ble to pre­dict which ones will piqué his inter­est and make it to theaters.

Case in point: the upcom­ing ani­mal revenge tale Pig, which also serves as the unex­pect­ed, hereto­fore unher­ald­ed fea­ture debut from lit­tle-known Michael Sarnos­ki. In the new trail­er, Cage plays to type as a man dri­ven to the brink of his san­i­ty by loss, a com­mon cir­cum­stance for the actor’s fil­mog­ra­phy placed in a fresh con­text with match­ing implications.

Cage por­trays a beard­ed, sunken-eyed, soli­tary chef-turned-truf­fle hunter, spend­ing his word­less days out in the woods with his trusty fun­gus-sniff­ing pig. When unknown oper­a­tors make off with his prize pig, both a source of sus­te­nance and a dear friend to this lone­ly man, the char­ac­ter known only as Rob” takes it upon him­self to get the crit­ter back by any mea­sures nec­es­sary, no mat­ter how extreme.

Ear­ly reac­tions to the trail­er made com­par­isons to John Wick, anoth­er one-man mis­sion to get ret­ri­bu­tion on behalf of a beloved pet, as well as Cage’s own work in the sim­i­lar­ly vengeance-fueled Mandy. But the trail­er isn’t in the accent­ed, bor­der­line phan­tas­magor­i­cal reg­is­ter of the Cage’s pre­vi­ous works, or even the guns-blaz­ing, no-mer­cy mode of ram­page pic­tures past.

A friend with advance screen­er access men­tioned to me that the film focus­es on the dark­er side of the haute-cui­sine indus­try in a more ground­ed capac­i­ty, rather than being the out-there mid­night-movie odd­i­ty the pub­lic may have pre­sumed. In either case, it’s going to be anoth­er pri­mal, ele­men­tal, yet strange­ly under­stat­ed per­for­mance to add to the curi­ous canon of Late Cage.

Pig comes to cin­e­mas in the US on 16 July. A UK date has yet to be set.

You might like