Review: Okja is the strange but striking tale of a big pig, a little girl and an evil multinational

REVIEW: Okja is the latest prestige movie release from Netflix’s new cinema division. You’ll be meeting a big pig, a little girl and an evil multinational.

OKJA (M)

Rating: three and a half stars (3.5 out of 5)

Director: Bong Joon Ho (Snowpiercer)

Starring: Tilda Swinton, Jake Gyllenhaal, Paul Dano, An Seo-hyun, Lily Collins.

The time has come to save her bacon

With analysts predicting it will only be a few years until streaming revenue overtakes traditional cinema box-office, Netflix is aggressively getting its house in order for this quantum shift in movie consumption.

The new Netflix game plan - and other streaming players such as Amazon are already following suit - is to harvest prominent filmmakers and A-list talent with the promise of complete creative control.

While results of the initiative have been mixed to date - the Brad Pitt military satire War Machine recently baffled and divided audiences - sooner or later, one of these prestige releases is going to hit big.

That Okja. He’s such a mega-ham. Picture: Supplied

Let’s be right upfront and state that Okja, the latest major movie production to roll off the Netflix assembly line, will not be the film to open the floodgates.

However, as an indicator of Netflix’s intent to rattle the cage and radically engage their massive audience in a way that Hollywood will not, Okja is one of the most significant releases of 2017.

Hence the movie’s highly contentious premiere at the recent Cannes Film Festival, where it was both roundly jeered (by old-school snobs) and cheered (by fans of risk-taking cinema).

The director of Okja is the great maverick Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho, and he’s working in the same crazed, cluttered and compelling manner as his last movie, the 2013 future-shock mindblower Snowpiercer.

Forget about the chubby pig. Tilda Swinton’s hair and makeup alone is enough of a warning things are gonna get weird in Okja. Picture: Supplied

This one starts out as what could be shaping as a family-friendly fable about a young girl, Mija (An Seo Hyun) whose best friend is her pet pig.

Okja is his name, and as a result of some dubious modifications to his DNA by a multinational food company - key operatives of which are played by Tilda Swinton and Jake Gyllenhaal - this perceptive and playful porker is the size of a morbidly obese hippo.

Hey Jake Gyllenhaal! Ned Flanders just called. He wants his look back. Picture: Supplied

The time has come for the corporation to reclaim the fatty treasure yielded by their experiment, and quite rightly, Mija is having none of that, thank you very much.

Though strangely delightful gives way to downright disturbing as the movie wears on, there is no way you can resist or forget the wilful, winning weirdness of it all.

Okja is now screening exclusively on Netflix.

Originally published as Review: Okja is the strange but striking tale of a big pig, a little girl and an evil multinational