Galán does this well, even though this inner turmoil is placed in scenes of interrogation (from the locals, and police) that aren’t funny, or scary, or sad when corpses start appearing. (Pereda throws in another act of violence that has the weight of a deleted scene.) When it should be jostling us in one way or another, “Piggy” feels like it’s just killing time.
Played by a burly Richard Holmes, the killer is a heavy-handed embodiment of Sara’s anger toward the bullies, a manifestation of anyone’s desire for their bullies to suffer. She finds comfort in him; their faces get close after they bump into each other in the woods (both of them trying to clear their tracks), and even though he has a knife in hand, her conception of the moment is romance, fantasy. Later, when they meet again, he does things more akin to Prince Charming while committing more violence that could be for her benefit, if she so chooses. He sees something in her, and she in him. His beats show the flip side of a love story with a brooding mystery man: sometimes said mystery figure is actually just Jason Voorhees.
Inside her home, Sara receives a lot of minimizing from her mother, who peppers in a “What is wrong with you?” on nearly every interaction. She is played with memorable presence by Carmen Machi, and in one of Pereda’s more amusing jokes, she always catches Sara in moments of her trying to sneak around the house. At times this character seems to be written as a more out of touch classic mother figure, but Machi shows the protective nature at the heart of this archetype. She’s also one of the few characters who gets enough dimension from a script that gets more and more narrow.
This all brings “Piggy” to a finale that simplifies everything even more down to a slight parable about having a corrosive hate in one’s heart. Pereda gets a couple staid slasher genre thrills out of it, mixing her boxy Academy aspect ratio with explosive gruesomeness, but it mostly, plainly hinges on what Sara does when confronted with the ultimate choice of her fantasy. Do bad people deserve the worst things? The question comes from a commendable surplus of empathy, but “Piggy” struggles with how limiting its intent can be when asking it.
Now playing in theaters.