Squeal

Algars Vilims and Kevin Janssens

Aik Karapetian's Squeal, currently streaming on Tubi, is the most interesting and impressive film I've seen since Sam Raimi's Send Help. Squeal received no theatrical release in the US and has generated little critical scrutiny. The reasons for this are obvious. While only superficially a horror film, a foreigner is chained up inside a pig barn a la Hostel, there is enough porcine viscera on display to seemingly disqualify the picture from serious attention. Also what kind of publicity can a film directed by an Armenian set in Latvia and populated by its denizens receive. However, Squeal is a deceivingly complex allegory, chock full with allusions, that seems to me one of the best films released in 2021.    

Belgian actor Kevin Janssens plays Samuel, a visitor to Latvia who we first encounter driving that country's back roads searching for his long lost father. He accidentally strikes a pig in the road, who will prove to be his guide on this hero's journey, and then he encounters a dour local woman named Kirke (Laura Silina). She beckons him to seek shelter at the pig farm she runs with her aged father (a splendidly sulphureous Aigars Vilims). She feeds Samuel and plies him with homemade vodka and when he awakes the next morning, he finds that he is an enchained prisoner living in a pigsty. After a few obligatory beatings, Kirke and her father are able to convince Samuel to help out by performing the most odious chores on the farm. Kirke, who has learned some English from her dead mother, is able to converse with Samuel and they tentatively bond. However, Samuel is coveted by two neighboring elders while their grotesque charge (a stunning Normunds Griestins), Jancuks, wants to take Kirke for his own. Complications ensue until Samuel, briefly, gains his freedom with the help of the magically realistic pig; a pattern that repeats.

Laura Silina

I don't want to dwell too much on the plot because, despite its fabulistic nature, Squeal has a few surprises in store that I don't want to divulge. One way to interpret the film is as a political allegory like Animal Farm. Though both works posit pigs as the lumpen proletariat, Squeal is not about the Russian Revolution. Instead it functions as an allegory about resistance to and assimilation of immigrants in modern day Europe. Samuel is initially derided and vilified as a "foreigner" by the locals. However, because of his physical prowess, Samuel earns the respect of the rural folk. By film's end he has been assimilated into the community, marrying and impregnating Kirke. The film never descends into mere allegory because of the multi-dimensionality of the characters and performances. All the leads are superb. Mr. Janssens, who is chained and naked for the first third of the film, gives one of the best physical performances I've seen in some time. His combination of brawniness and vulnerability reminded me of Viggo Mortensen's performances in A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. The film avoids a fairy tale ending as Samuel spies the magical pig who has aided him leaving the farm for a life of freedom. He wonders if he is better off enjoying the tyranny of domesticity or the liberty of the rootless. It illustrates the binary posited by the great writer Dave Hickey: is he a pirate or a farmer?

The other aspect of this intriguing film that I want to touch on are its allusions to Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, another tale of an outsider and his troubling assimilation into European society. Both films employ an ironic and omniscient narrator. The musical theme played during two key scenes between Kirke and Samuel is one of the two love themes employed in Barry Lyndon: the Irish folk tune "Women of Ireland". The scene where Kirke serves Samuel a meal mirrors the one in which Redmond Barry is seduced by a comely German woman. The twist in Squeal is that the meal is a honey trap. A later scene between Kirke and Samuel also offers a variation on the scene in which Barry attempts to locate a piece of cloth in the bodice of his kissing cousin. Furthermore, a scene in which Samuel rescues Kirke's father after he is shot during a fracas calls to mind Barry rescuing his injured commanding officer in the Kubrick film. I feel that the allusions are neither obscure nor gratuitous, but add to the texture of a magnificent film that unspools in a scant 85 minutes.