Netflix Review - Okja (15)

It's all edible. All edible except the squeal.

The Gist: Mija lives in the South Korean mountains with her grandfather and best friend - a pig of elephantine proportions, which she has raised from piglet to vast lumbering adult, naming the beast Okja. Known to us but not to her, Okja is one of twenty-six genetically modified super-pigs and property of the multinational Mirando corporation. When the creature is reclaimed (as planned from its birth) by Mirando, the truth becomes horribly real to Mija and she sets off in pursuit. Joining forces with a group of animal rights activists in Seoul, she determines to free the creature and return it to its rural home. But her efforts pit her against powerful and ruthless corporate opponents.

The Juice: Anyone who saw Bong Joon Ho's Oscar-bagging Parasite will have known that the Korean director's success didn't come out of nowhere. If his 7th feature film got you wondering about his back catalogue, Okja is a great place to start exploring. Just don't let its Disney-esque opening scenes of a little girl playing in the wilds with her giant lovable pig-pal fool you into thinking this is cuddly family fare. The same dark themes as in Parasite provide an unsettling undercurrent here, one that becomes steadily more assertive as the story unfolds. This director targets the excesses of 21st Century capitalism, both when developing original stories and when bringing them memorably to life on screen. 

A South Korean/US co-production for Netflix, Okja is nonetheless a big screen film through and through, boasting the same glorious widescreen framing and lustrous visuals as its award-winning successor. It opening act makes full use of Korea's lush mountain forests, before the movie plunges along with Okja and Mija into the claustrophobia of a modern urban landscape, hurtling with no little destruction through shopping malls and motorway tunnels. But it's the latter stages - containing the story's most grim satire - that become tinged with a very specific kind of horror. Through it all Okja is convincingly realised, whether lumbering through her preferred habitat or thundering in attempted escape from her persecutors. It's a tribute to both the technology and the film's direction that you buy into this outlandish story so completely.

Okja's pixelated rampage, it should be said, is backed up with a quality human cast, Korean Seo-hyun Ahn at its centre as the mega-pig's anguished but determined young companion. Tilda Swinton is funny as the corporation's brittly smiling CEO (and rather unnecessarily her twin sister) and Paul Dano empathetically heads up the animal freedom fighters, a group filled out with dependable types like Lily Collins and The Walking Dead's Steven Yeun. Jake Gyllenhaal's demented celebrity naturalist (and public face of the Mirando Corp.) is a rare example of the upper-tier actor pushing things a little too far.

The Judgement: 7.5/10. Okja is a vivid, occasionally shocking modern fable; it starts out cute, but turns fully dystopian, an initially happy face giving way to anger at corporate greed and its resultant cruelty. True the film could do with some narrative trimming, its comedy can be a bit too broad and its satire is delivered with a sledgehammer thump. But the wealth of imagination on display here more than makes up for all and the Mija/Okja relationship will warm your heart - when its not busy breaking it. This is a tale from a film-maker forging a path to greatness and demands priority on your Netflix watch list.