It can’t be said that this movie’s title is false advertising. Cathy Yan’s 2018 feature, coming to streaming in the U.S. this week, opens with a wide-eyed pig farmer coming home from a virtual reality demo to find one of his prize animals unexpectedly turned into an ex-pig. Old Wang (Haoyu Yang) is first befuddled, then highly dispirited as the rest of his animals go the way of all diseased flesh. He, like other pig farmers in the increasingly overdeveloped Shanghai, dumps the useless corpses in a nearby river, where they keep popping up. Like metaphors.
Advertisement
Dead Pigs review – winding tale of life in cash-crazed Shanghai Peter Bradshaw
A breezily westernised style of Chinese movie is on offer in this 2018 debut feature from Chinese-American film-maker Cathy Yan, who two years later went to Hollywood to direct Birds of Prey, starring Margot Robbie. Dead Pigs is an ensemble dramedy set in Shanghai that satirises – in a distinctly lenient way – the commercialism eating away at China’s heart. It is inspired by a real-life incident in which thousands of dead pigs were found in the city’s Huangpu river, dumped by poverty-stricken farmers who couldn’t pay the disposal fees; the pig symbolism reminded me a tiny bit of Alan Bennett’s A Private Function.
Most American audiences know Cathy Yan for having directed last year s anarchic supervillain(ess) caper
Birds of Prey, but now they ll finally have a chance to catch up on her work leading up to Harley Quinn s fantabulous emancipation. The filmmaker s debut feature
Dead Pigs, which premiered at Sundance in 2018 (where it won the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award for Ensemble Acting), gets its global release on Friday, and EW can exclusively reveal the darkly funny indie s trailer, above. It feels a little bit like going back to my roots and going home, to be talking about Dead Pigs again, three years after its festival premiere, Yan tells EW. I am deeply proud of the film. It feels good to finally get it out there, and hopefully, it doesn t feet dated at all. I don t