Review of Okja (2017) by Travis W — 08 Jan 2018

Critics often refer to director Bong Joon-ho as an eclectic stylist, known for mixing and mashing genres within a single film. But first and foremost, Bong's a humanist. His eclecticism serves to represent the vast range of human experience-weird, wild, tragic, and joyful.

Bong's newest film, Okja, locates its deep-abiding humanity in the relationship between 10 year old Mija (An Se Hyun) and her superpig best friend, Okja, for nowhere is humanity more transcendent than in the friendship between man and beast.

Nowhere too is humankind more reprehensible than in its genocidal disregard for all nonhuman creatures. At this extreme is the Mirando Corporation, headed by two Tilda Swintons, who want Okja as the mascot for their new genetically modified pork product, and as part of the product-line itself.

Caught betwixt Mija's love and the Mirando Corporation's slaughterhouse is the indigent farmer who raised Okja; a middle-management hollow man; an apathetic millennial; well-intentioned but ethically compromised members of the Animal Liberation Front; and Jake Gyllenhal doing an unfortunate imitation of an anime villain (or something?).

Melee ensues, with even Blackwater-like mercenaries popping in for a demoralizing cameo, but the emotional center of the film holds fast in spite of it all. Few devices in storytelling have the heart-wrenching immediacy of a friendship between a child and an animal. The love they share is pure, uncontrived, painfully earnest, and tender. Any challenge to it stands starkly evil in contrast.

And here, starkly evil indeed, looms the big business of agribusiness. Bong adheres to the "glass walls" dictum, not shying away from the gruesome spectacle, but instead having the audience witness the horrors of factory farming through Mija's young, impressionable eyes.

Raucously fun and brutally devastating, Okja is the 2017 film most likely to change your life.