Another year, another chance to find and consume some undeniable gems on your favorite streaming services. As you get back to your normal routine, there’s still plenty of opportunity to find interesting movies on a streaming service like Hulu, which has built up a very respectable library of movies over the years. One of those films is Pig, a recent Nicolas Cage movie that broke out in a major way, and for good reason.
The movie follows a man living in rural Oregon who tries to hunt down the people responsible for kidnapping his pig. While it may sound like Cage’s riff on John Wick, Pig turns out to have much more profound, beautiful ideas at its center.
It’s Nicolas Cage’s best performance in decades
Few actors are capable of going as big as Nicolas Cage (Dream Scenario), and the actor is often willing to lean into that shtick to great effect. While he has certainly had some dark periods in a decades-long career, Cage has firmly reemerged as a movie star, and we can all be grateful that he’s still around.
In Pig, Cage delivers a performance that strips away much of the hamminess that he usually relies on. It’s a quiet, wounded performance as Cage plays a man who has cut himself off from the world in part to save himself from deep sadness. Cage goes deliberately small here, and winds up delivering one of the most moving performances of his career.
It’s a beautiful movie about grief and humanity
Although Pig initially seems like it’s going to be about revenge, it ultimately winds up being a story about two men, Cage’s character and the man who stole his pig, who are both dealing with the loss of their partners. In the end, it’s that shared grief that brings them together, and allows them to come to an understanding.
Although the loss is in the distant past for Cage’s character, Cage plays the hurt so cleanly, reminding us that you never really stop grieving for those you lose. Ultimately, Pig argues that all we can do is honor the memories of those we’ve known, and that’s exactly what its characters attempt to do.
It’s pretty excellent food porn
In addition to its profound portraiture of grief, Pig is also a movie about food. Cage’s character is a former high-level chef who left the business in the wake of his partner’s death, but still knows how to create something truly beautiful with food.
The movie’s climactic sequence involves Cage making a meal for the movie’s ostensible antagonist, helping him to evoke a memory from the distant past. The food throughout looks exquisite, even if Cage often looks a little bit worse for the wear while he’s making it.
Pig is streaming on Hulu.
