Okja

Okja (2017) is the story of a girl and an enormous pig, and it is really about industrial animal farming. A corporation runs a global competition: super pig calves are distributed to twenty six countries and the best one will be chosen ten years later. Mija grows up in the Korean mountains with the animal she names Okja. Then the company comes to collect it. The first half plays like a children's adventure and the second half is something else. Bong Joon Ho keeps shifting the register and the final section goes into a slaughterhouse. For anyone who came expecting a children's film, that passage is a shock. Its Cannes screening was discussed more than the film. The audience booed when the Netflix logo appeared. The projection then started in the wrong aspect ratio and was halted; it restarted about ten minutes later and the logo was booed again. The festival apologised, saying the fault lay with its own technical staff. The lasting consequence: from the following year Cannes ruled that films without a French theatrical release could not compete. This film changed the festival's rules. Tilda Swinton and Jake Gyllenhaal play deliberately heightened; the only realistic character is the pig. It runs 120 minutes. Good for: Bong Joon Ho, genre hybrids, and films about ethics and the environment. Less good for: the slaughterhouse scenes are genuinely hard and it is not for children. The tonal shifts are abrupt.