Okja Film Review: A Pig-turesque Adventure

Okja brings us face-to-face with our own fragile position in nature, raising important questions about animals and their place in the world.

Okja takes place in a world where pigs have been genetically manufactured to an abnormal size, and farmers across the world are competing in a contest to raise the healthiest “super pig” for human consumption. But when a young girl named Mija (Ahn Seo-hyun) develops a close bond with her family’s pig, things become much more complicated.

What’s so endearing about Okja is just how open and transparent its message is: it’s so clearly a call to arms for compassion and empathy, using the meat farming industry as a way to explore how easily these traits can be forgotten. Like many of Joon-ho’s most effective villains, the antagonists in this story are comically evil and wildly exaggerated – but importantly, not too dissimilar to society as it truly is. Tilda Swinton’s villainous Lucy Mirando is introduced as the epitome of corporate greed, delivering a clinical presentation about the animals and their new homes, presenting their eventual slaughter as a prize to be celebrated. But as the story progresses and Mija understands more about the world she’s stepping into, it becomes increasingly clear that Mirando and her empire are the most realistic things about this narrative. 

Interestingly, Okja doesn’t particularly preach any kind of message about eating meat or promoting a plant-based lifestyle, because that’s really not what Joon-ho is interested in doing. Instead, the film is a much more general takedown of capitalism and greed, particularly through the deception by large companies of their customers. The focus on animal farming is just an effective method to get this point across – and it works excellently. Okja is one of the director’s most stirring and effective films, using the entire first act to establish the friendship between Mija and the titular animal before they’re ultimately separated and the real adventure begins.

Perhaps what’s most interesting about Okja is how carefully it balances the line between being a family adventure and a dark, mature drama. The opening scenes with Mija and Okja in the forest are extremely fun and childish on the surface, but it soon becomes clear that Joon-ho is drawing on the existing stereotypes of cute, cartoonish animals in children’s movies to make Okja’s reality even more tragic. His subversion of these tropes makes the graphic depictions of animal farming even more disgusting; it’s harder to watch these creatures slaughtered for their flesh when you view them as cute companions rather than simple livestock.

Beyond its narrative strength, Okja is also an incredibly dynamic and technically proficient film that displays some of Bong Joon-ho’s most creative direction to date. The action sequences (of which there are more than you’d expect from a film about a huge pig) are stylish and energetic, while the more tranquil scenes in the rainforest really benefit from their atmosphere and colorful aesthetics. This all contributes towards Okja’s extremely immersive brand of storytelling, where the action and dialogue are rarely as important as the broader emotions that the film instills in the audience.

Ultimately, Okja may not be Bong Joon-ho’s most revolutionary or innovative film, but it’s certainly one of his most memorable. The story often takes a back seat to allow the movie’s aesthetics to do the talking, placing the audience directly into this vivid world of friendship and compassion, before pulling the rug from underneath them and truly making Mija’s pain tangible. There are few directors who could pull off such a bold and subversive story in a way that constantly feels cohesive and authentic, but Bong Joon-ho is among them.

Okja is now available to watch on digital and on demand.

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