At its most intense, Piggy—a horror film from Spanish director Carlota Pereda premiering in select theaters Friday and wide on Oct. 14—is almost as fascinated in bodily destruction as the Saw movies. Pereda’s greatest triumphs, however, are 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 a gaggle of slender teenage girls, who seem to follow her everywhere she goes just so they can belittle her with names like “Piggy.” At every turn, Pereda reminds us that this is the true horror. Even as Sara’s revenge nightmare reaches its bloody climax, it’s her bullies’ cruelty that sticks in the mind the most.
Sara’s bullies first find her at her father’s butcher shop in Extremadura, where she often works. One of the girls, Claudia (Irene Ferreiro), seems reluctant to participate in the cruelty but never stands up against it. Still, the harassment escalates when the group finds Sara at the local pool. Their ringleader, Maca (Claudia Salas), almost drowns Sara with a pool net as she pushes the girl’s head down toward the water, cackling all the while. Forced to walk home in a small bathing suit after the girls ran off with her clothes, Sara’s afternoon becomes even more traumatizing when a group of young men attack her and try to run her over with their car.
The sounds Galán makes in these scenes are almost animalistic in their distress. Her body seems to be on fire and freezing all at once as she grips at her arms, her torso, her unclasped 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 is so dazed on the walk home that she almost fails to notice that her bullies have been captured in a van. When she looks up and sees the desperate girls (and the man who captured them) the teen makes a startling decision: She turns away and lets him drive off with them.
Piggy’s most evocative scenes capture the psychological effects of bullying at their most visceral. Sara radiates with the panicked energy of a trapped animal as she wails and convulses and sobs through a torment everyone around her refuses to see or understand. Filled with shame and scorned 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’ families frantically search for them.
In Spain, like everywhere else, the female body has been a political battleground. Early on in the film, we observe Sara walking by a sign emblazoned with the slogan “Todo por la patria”—which has its roots in Francisco Franco’s fascist 1936 coup. Catholicism was paramount to Franco’s New Spain. Women were expected to be modest in dress—bikinis would become a major battleground in the 1950’s—and physical education became an essential tool to ensure Spanish women would be “fit mothers for the fatherland.” Many markers of femininity, like stockings, would have been out of reach for women below a certain socioeconomic class.
By including that slogan so early in the film, Pereda (who also wrote the screenplay) might be slyly hinting at the systemic cruelty that underpins the bullying Sara faces—a system of repression that relies, above all, on sowing division and scapegoating those who fall outside an arbitrary “norm.” Sara’s is not the kind of docile body fascists are known to prize, and her status as a butcher’s daughter further alienates her from her bullies, whose families also appear to be wealthier.
Tender moments are rare in Piggy, but at its most vulnerable, the film can be as disarming as it is twisted. When Sara eventually confronts her bullies’ kidnapper, she seems to intuitively know he won’t hurt her. For some reason she can’t grasp, this murderous man—and no one else—is on her side. He looks at her with wonder in his eyes, and as they hide together in the dark, he touches his lips and exhales her name in a murmur—a sensual moment she later imagines as she masturbates beneath her sheets (and under the watchful eye of a Virgin Mary figurine).
Pereda maintains a frenetic pace throughout the film and avoids the didactic pitfalls that can drag down even the best-conceived social horror films. Confident, impressionistic, and stressful to the last moment, Piggy is a gripping testament to just how brutal human beings can be—especially to those they’ve deemed less than human.
