A Pig Called Natural

At Cannes in May 2017, the audience booed the Netflix logo. Then, for the first seven minutes of the film's premiere, the projector showed Okja in the wrong aspect ratio. The festival apologised to the filmmakers afterwards. When the lights came up, the film got a four-minute standing ovation.

That is a reasonable summary of Okja itself: a streaming-giant product, booed for what it was, then forgiven by anyone who stayed to watch. It is also a film about a company that makes a product so likeable that people forget to ask what it's for.

The set-up is simple. In 2007, Lucy Mirando (Tilda Swinton) takes over the Mirando Corporation and announces a "super pig" programme. Twenty-six piglets go to farmers around the world, and in ten years the best will be crowned. In the Korean mountains, a girl called Mija (Ahn Seo-hyun) and her grandfather raise one of them. They call her Okja. She is enormous and unfailingly gentle. When the decade is up, Mirando comes to collect, and Mija chases the truck to Seoul.

The art: a fairy tale with a kill floor

Bong Joon-ho, who co-wrote the script with Jon Ronson, has made a film that changes gear faster than most directors dare. The first act is a pastoral, and the creature design makes the animal read as an animal. She has weight, and Darius Khondji's photography keeps her in the same light as the people, so you believe the girl can lean her whole face against her flank. The still above is that moment.

Then the film becomes a chase. Then a heist. Then a farce with Jake Gyllenhaal as Johnny Wilcox, a TV zoologist who has apparently never had a thought without a camera on it, performing in a register that hovers between genius and a sketch show. Paul Dano leads the animal-liberation cell with the earnest politeness of a man who has rehearsed his principles. Swinton plays Lucy and her twin sister Nancy, and both are weaponised niceness in pastel.

Some of this is too much. Gyllenhaal's voice is a bit of a bit, and the film sometimes loses the thread of its own anger while enjoying a joke. But the tonal swerves are the point. Bong has said that he went to a slaughterhouse in Colorado to research the film, and that he and producer Dooho Choi became vegans for a while afterwards. You can feel why the film couldn't stay a fairy tale. The slaughterhouse sequence is the one you'll still be thinking about in a month. It is not a monster's lair. It reads as a workplace, which is worse.

Then comes the ending, which I think is the best idea in the film. Mija, who has no money and no power, offers a small gold pig figure to buy Okja's life, and Nancy accepts it. She sees a good deal. The film's most hopeful moment is also a commercial transaction. Nobody has been persuaded of anything, and a price has just been met.

The prophecy: the pig is fiction, the launch is not

Okja is not set in the future. It is set in about the year it came out, and its super pig is the only fantastical element. That makes it a strange film to put through a prophecy test, and a useful one, because it forces you to separate the animal from the story told about the animal.

The animal. Nobody has built an Okja. There is no engineered pig the size of a hippo, calm enough to walk through a city and efficient enough to feed it. What exists is smaller and more specific. In December 2020 the US Food and Drug Administration approved the GalSafe pig, engineered to lack the sugar alpha-gal, for food and for potential medical use. In March 2022 it said it would not object to the marketing of beef from two CRISPR-edited cattle with short, slick coats, a trait meant to cope with heat. In April 2025 it approved PIC's gene edit that makes pigs resistant to the PRRS virus. PIC said it would not start selling until other countries had signed off, and Brazil and Colombia had. The edits are small, aimed at disease and tolerance, not scale. The giant animal is still fiction. The principle, that a company can own and sell a pig whose genome it wrote, has arrived.

The pitch. This is where the film is very good. Lucy Mirando doesn't pitch the pig as a triumph of engineering. She pitches it as the answer to world hunger, a pig that eats less and leaves less behind, and she does it in the vocabulary of a farmers' market. Reviewers at the time noted that her words are "natural", "eco-friendly" and "local", and that the film treats them as spin. Look at the conversation about meat in the 2020s and you will find the same shape. The cultivated-meat start-ups, whose chicken was cleared by the US Department of Agriculture in June 2023, sold themselves as the humane, low-footprint future. Florida banned the stuff in 2024, and in March 2026 a federal appeals court upheld the ban. The fight was never about the biology. It was about which side got to say "natural".

The sober version of the idea has a sadder record. The University of Guelph's Enviropig, engineered to excrete less phosphorus and so pollute less, was real, and the project ended in 2012 when its funder withdrew. Its lead scientist told the Toronto Star that he had expected such animals to be accepted within a decade, and that he was wrong. The pig that was better for the planet lost its funding. The pig with the better story only had to be shown on screen.

The cameras. The film's activists don't storm the factory. They get footage out of it, and the film understands that the footage is the weapon. In 2012 Mercy For Animals released undercover video from an Idaho dairy, and Idaho passed a law against that kind of filming. A federal judge struck it down in 2015, as did an Iowa judge in 2019, but in January 2024 the Eighth Circuit upheld two Iowa laws against such investigations. The film's wager that a recording can move a public is correct, and so is the industry's fear of it.

The reading

Okja is wobbly in the middle and devastating at either end, and its best trick is that the monster isn't the pig. It's the sentence Lucy Mirando says over the pig, which is why the film has dated so little. The animal remains fiction. The language that sells it has been in use for years.

Mija wins in the only currency the company recognises. She pays, and Nancy Mirando, who has made a good deal, lets her go. Bong lets us see how small that victory is: the company's sums still balance, and a pig leaves the building because someone has paid for it. A piglet is pushed through the slaughterhouse fence to Okja, and the film ends back in the mountains. The rest of the herd stays behind it, in the system that made her.