Pig Hill

There is so much mist swirling around in Kevin Lewis’ Pig Hill that one rarely sees characters’ feet. Do they take the usual form, or are they trotters? The story goes that a strange race of pig people haunts the titular landmark, and nobody had better stray up there after dark. Of course, savvy viewers might note that ground-level mist like this forms in valleys, not on hills. Perhaps what we do see is not what it appears to be.

An opening vignette presents a drug dealer and his girlfriend seeking to score on the hill. It gives us a taste of the violence that is to follow, and is also notable for the supporting turn by Emma Kotos, a real standout – she’s at an early stage in her career and, by this token, deserves a lot more attention. Soon we will see missing person posters with her character’s picture in the nearby town. She’s one of ten women to go missing in the past decade; four in the past year. Doing her digging, Carrie (Rainey Qualley), who is writing a book on the subject, discovers that women have been disappearing in the area for a long time – longer than can be explained by the theory that there’s a serial killer around. Could the pig people be real?

Carrie is obsessed with the pig people, her brother Chris (Shiloh Fernandez) jokes. One imagines that she would have to be in order to find time to work on the book alongside her day job in a second hand bookshop and her night shifts volunteering in a shelter for homeless people, especially when she’s still recovering from the recent disintegration of her marriage and her abandonment by her husband. Chris, with whom she now lives, is protective to the point of being suffocating. Then again, her shelter work can be intensely traumatic, as we witness early on, and although she’s clearly intelligent, sometimes she seems to struggle to retain full control of her faculties. Is she dreaming when she seems to see the silhouette of a man with the head of a pig watching her?

Complicating matters further is the arrival of a stranger – a man who lived in the town as a child but got out when he could and has only recently returned. This is Andy (Shane West), and he and Carrie quickly become involved, much to Chris’ consternation. He says he’ll help her with her research, but can she really trust him?

There are so many layers to the story in Pig Hill that they sometimes get in one another’s way, with the homeless shelter, for instance, dropped halfway through as if it has lost all potential relevance. A new twist emerges when Carrie and Andy visit the hill and encounter a man who calls himself the Pig King of Pig Hill Farm. Dino Tripodis certainly delivers on ham, and rather delightfully so, but it has the effect ofc further unbalancing the narrative. Adding to these difficulties is Lewis’ tendency to ratchet everything up to 11 at frequent intervals, with big emotion, intense use of horror motifs and surging Goblinesque riffs in Émoi’s already dramatic score. This leaves the film with nowhere new to go when it really matters.

If you’re in it for the gore and grotesquerie, as was doubtless the case for some of its viewers at Frightfest, you’ll find a good deal to satisfy you, but it does give the impression of wanting to deliver in more sophisticated ways as well. The degradation of female characters goes beyond what’s necessary without contributing anything of substance, and the crude way that it handles hypnotism in one investigative scene risks reinforcing problematic myths – likewise its approach to victimhood. Still, if you can get past all the sound and fury, there’s an effective little mystery thriller hiding underneath. As the visceral slams into the metaphorical, it raises questions about the social utility of the horror genre, particularly in relation to the transformations that its heroines frequently undergo.

Reviewed on: 24 Aug 2025