Pig That Survived Foot-and-Mouth Disease

Nothing screams “Kaboom” more than a deranged Korean eco-horror fable about mutated pigs, armed desertion, a suicidal young woman, metamorphosis, and the chaos they all provoke. Drenched in atmospheric misanthropy, Pig That Survived Foot-and-Mouth Disease has been called a gory cross-over between Bong Joon-ho’s Okja and the nightmarish classic Watership Down. Even Sylvia Plath’s poetry gets thrown in the mix – and script.

In a narrative where the humans are perhaps the real animals, Korean Academy of Film Arts graduate Hur Bum-wook’s sophomore feature dives into the foot-and-mouth epidemic of 2010 that led to the culling of hundreds of thousands of pigs. But what if one pig survived, built himself up from the ground (quite literally so) and retaliated? At the same time, what if a humiliated soldier, haunted by the murder of an officer, yearned to become an animal?

These are the exact questions that kept Hur awake at night, causing him to direct a muddy fever dream of almost Dantesque proportions. Through all the anthropomorphising going on, corruption stands front and centre – making Pig That Survived Foot-and-Mouth Disease feel like a Shakespeare play transported to an era where humanity has stopped caring for every living being, whether human or animal. Impressively told and animated, it’s a monster of a film – in all the right ways.