“Pig”–Fatty with Little Meat

Pig (2021) is an odd indie film about a truffle forager, Rob Feld (played by a mostly grunting Nicolas Cage), a former elite restaurateur who has fallen on hard times.  In the middle of the night, his beloved truffle-finding pig has been stolen somewhere deep in the woods where he lives in a cabin far from Portland. 

Eking out a living selling the Oregon black truffle, Rob is grief-stricken and determined to find his beloved porcine more for the pig’s companionship than for the income lost.

A young and somewhat suspect neophyte truffle dealer, Amir (Alex Wolff), purchases Old Man Rob’s truffles at Rob’s cabin. He too has now lost his primary source of revenue for a lifestyle far richer than his cabin hermit vendor.

Joining forces to find the treasured pig, Amir and Rob hunt down Edgar who runs an odd underground fight club for restaurant workers in the basement of the now-closed Hotel Portland. A brutal fight elicits  the name of a trendy chef, Finway, from Edgar’s bloody mouth.  Blood matted into his filthy serial-killer beard and eyebrows, Cage is off on a demonic hunt.

Finway, in tears, his soul conquered, divulges who is responsible for the craven pig-napping.   The final moments of Pig shows Rob preparing one of his signature culinary masterpieces he served to Darius, Amir’s father and Amir’s wife, the same dish he served the couple at his restaurant many years ago. Tasting the dish softens Darius’s villainous heart, allowing him to finally reveal the full story of what happened to the truffle-loving pig.

The ending of Pig is ambiguous and anomalous, more inessential fat than substance.  What happens to Rob is left to the viewer to decide.  While I love a fill-in-the-blanks answer sometimes, leaving the ending to the imagination, poor old sad-sack Rob is left without much support to carry on.  There was no There There.

Availability:  Hulu streaming

Note:  Nicolas Cage was nominated for a 2021 Critics Choice Award but snubbed for this year’s Oscars.