Somewhere in the Oregon woods, a man and his pig hunt truffles in near-total silence. Then, one night, the pig is taken.
What is Pig about?
A solitary truffle hunter has built a life far from other people in the wilderness of Oregon, with only his foraging pig for company. The animal is his livelihood and, as the film gradually makes clear, a great deal more than that. When intruders break in and steal her, the man has no choice but to leave the forest and go back to Portland, a city he walked away from years earlier for reasons he has never explained. The search takes him through the back doors of the city's restaurant world, where old acquaintances still remember a name he has stopped using. What begins as the outline of a revenge story keeps declining to become one: instead of violence, the journey turns on food, memory and the question of what a person owes the life he abandoned.
About the cast
Nicolas Cage leads the cast, with Alex Wolff in the other principal role. Adam Arkin, Nina Belforte, Gretchen Corbett, Dalene Young, Darius Pierce and Elijah Ungvary make up the supporting company. Cage works in a quiet, pared-back register here, and the contrast between his stillness and Wolff's restless energy structures most of the scenes they share.
Context & significance
Pig marks the feature directing debut of Michael Sarnoski and was released in 2021 as a co-production between the United Kingdom and the United States. At a compact 92 minutes, it is classified as drama and thriller, though it uses the thriller framework mainly as a doorway into something more contemplative. The setting matters: the Pacific Northwest's forests and Portland's food scene give the story a very particular texture, and the world of high-end restaurants becomes a stage for questions about authenticity, ambition and loss. Viewers expecting an action picture should adjust their expectations; the film is deliberately paced, sparse in dialogue and interested above all in grief and how people carry it.
Watching Pig on Ktime
Pig is available on K-Time with a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so you can follow either the original English soundtrack or a dubbed version. You will need to log in with a K-Time account to play the film. The service is built around a Farsi interface for Persian speakers living abroad, and browsing this page requires no login at all.