Review of Dead Pigs / 海上浮城, directed by Cathy Yan

I’ve been on such an Asian cinema kick lately, and I don’t really know why. I’ve been watching so many Asian dramas from China and Korea, and then this started bleeding onto the movies I was watching as well. Yet, somehow, I don’t know how all of this started.

So needless to say, I am so grateful platforms like MUBI and Netflix have been having more Asian content than usual. It’s been what keeps me going nowadays, especially as I wrap up the final stages of my master’s thesis.

Anyways, Dead Pigs is one of those movies I’ve been staring at for a long time in my to-watch list, but never actually got around to watching until it was literally the last moment. It was available on MUBI for the longest time (aka: for as long as I’ve had the subscription), and I’ve always scrolled past it and thought about watching the film.

It’s when the little yellow banner saying it’s leaving the platform in a few days that I realized I needed to go and do something about it. With two days left to spare, I finally watched the movie.

Here’s my review!

An ensemble cast of characters provide a comedic satire on a changing Shanghai.

The setting of this story is in and around Shanghai, which has rapidly developed in modern years. We focus on several different characters: a pig farmer, a salon owner, a busboy, an architect, and a rich girl.

For the pic farmer, Old Wang, business has been booming. He’s investing all of the money he makes from his pig sales back into the stock market in China in hopes of making it big.

Meanwhile, his sister is Candy. They are estranged and don’t really talk anymore, but she’s also making a killing with her business. She opens a hair salon that provides self-help services along with the hair styling, so a lot of wealthy individuals are coming to her to vent out their problems.

Turns out she has a major problem on her own: she lives in the ancestral family home. A major corporation wants to take over the land, which happens to be the last home in the plot outside of Shanghai.

They want it to develop the land and turn it into something new, but Candy isn’t going down without a fight.

We then pivot to the one white American guy around here: Sean. He’s working on the project to develop the land, and he’s the head architect. He might not actually be qualified to do anything, but he’s certainly faking it until he makes it.

We then pivot from him to Wang Zhen, who left behind his father’s pig farm to lie about being a businessman. On the side he works at a restaurant that specializes in roasted pigs.

He meets a rich girl, Xia Xia, here. All of these characters are living their independent lives, but everything is about to come together for them as dead pigs appear in the waterways of Shanghai. Old Wang’s pigs start dying too, leading to not only a public health crisis, but a food one as well as people have become obsessed with pork.

Overall Thoughts

I find satires really hard to do well, but I genuinely enjoyed Dead Pigs! I think that it was funny when it needed to be, and that I ended up finding myself gravitating towards what the characters represent throughout the course of the film.

There are a lot of underlying tension on class and what exactly it means to rapidly develop in the world, especially in the Chinese context. A lot of these characters are focused on making money and becoming the next big thing, which puts them in a perpetual cycle of exploiting the environment and world around them.

I wish I didn’t procrastinate for so long on this film, but go watch it if you haven’t already.

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