Cerdita: What Little Girls Are Made Of

I don’t know why the stereotypical slasher movie is about a bunch of teenagers being chased by some faceless maniac (well, no, I do know why, it’s because those films make a lot of money and they’re not especially hard to produce), when the reality of being a teenager is so often so close to a horror movie anyway. At least, if you’re the wrong kind of teenager. Being trapped in a small community with a bunch of other people who are still in the process of developing empathy but are already practiced at petty (and not-so-petty) cruelty, people who have literally nothing better to do than harass you…I mean, that’s fucking awful. And so this is how we get films as good as Carrie and Let The Right One In and as bad as The Final. Whatever the ostensible supernatural horror , it’s often got nothing on what the people around the protagonist are doing to them on a regular basis.

And this is the ground covered by Cerdita (Piggy) - it’s sort of a coming-of-age story, sort of a fairytale, painted in blood. It’s got a fair amount of promise to start and plays fair with its characters, but I think ultimately it ends up copping out and shying away from really doing something daring with its premise.

It’s summertime in the Extremadura region of Spain, a time for people in villages to get ready for festivals, for local running of the bulls, for lazy days at the village swimming pool. We open on someone making sausage - pouring blood into a stuffing mixture, sharpening knives, chopping up the meat, stuffing it all into casings. It’s the local butcher shop, and the owners’ daughter Sara sits to the side, behind the counter, studying and doing her homework. She’s listening to music on headphones and chewing neurotically on a strand of her own hair. Sara’s mother worries because she doesn’t get enough fresh air, spends all of her time inside, and doesn’t seem to have any friends. Mostly because people call her “pig” and post mocking images of her on social media. Boys chase her down the street, calling her “Miss Bacon.” Even Claudia, the closest thing she has to a friend, joins in. You know what they say. Kids can be so cruel.

And then finally, Sara’s mother gets her to go the village pool to go swimming. The pool is quiet, not bustling like it was earlier in the day, and Sara enjoys swimming in the relative solitude. At least, until a group of girls show up. It’s just them and her, no adults around, and it gets pretty bad, pretty quickly. It ends with them stealing her clothes, her phone, and her towel, leaving her to walk home, humiliated, in nothing but her bathing suit.

But someone else was watching the entire time - someone who was busy dumping the bodies of the pool’s lifeguard and waitress when it all happened.

He’s not happy about how they treated Sara.

Soon enough people - well, specifically teenagers - start to vanish. Nothing like this ever happens here, the biggest tragedy they’ve ever had to deal with was a fire. There are literally two police officers for the entire village, and they're father and son. Everyone’s looking for a culprit, everyone’s looking for some kind of explanation, and the whole time, Sara - who saw something she shouldn’t have on her mortifying trek home - knows something that might help. But she doesn’t say anything. And it’s understandable why she doesn’t - the bullying she withstands is hard to watch, and it’s clear pretty early on that the reason she doesn’t want to ever get out and get fresh air is because she’s a target to pretty much everyone outside of her immediate family. There’s a sense of constant vulnerability, which butts up against her being largely untouched in the middle of the tragedy that’s come to visit this small, sleepy town. Now it’s everyone else’s turn to not feel safe.

Nevertheless, she’s caught on the hooks of a moral dilemma - she knows what’s happened, but when has anyone been on her side? Her peers treat her like shit, the closest thing she has to a friend is absolutely complicit as well. Her mother - a complicated figure - is as quick to berate her as she is to defend her to others, and her father is sympathetic but maybe doesn’t have the spine he needs. Nobody’s listened to her before now, so why bother? It’s a small town, people talk, and soon enough the mysterious disappearances are front and center and Sara’s being pulled in all different directions by a bunch of people who aren’t really concerned with her well-being. She goes from being disregarded at best and abused at worst to really nothing more than a tool in the service of helping other people to feel better. This film isn’t quite a character study, but a lot of it does play out in the dynamics between people, and everyone feels believable, complicated and flawed.

It’s a very visually confident film as well. There’s a lot of imagery at play here - the butcher shop means there’s meat to be chopped up, bones to be sawed through, and Sara is constantly described in terms of meat, of bacon, of something to be consumed. That is her value to others, she exists as flesh on which they feed, at least metaphorically. She’s nothing more than the meat of her body. There are fairytale allusions as well - the Three Little Pigs being the most obvious, but there are also nods to Beauty and the Beast, Little Red Riding Hood, and the idea of what it means to be Prince Charming. These aren’t blatant, they’re just sort of woven into the story, there to be appreciated without being ham-handed, and so there’s a nice contrast between the idealism of fairytales (what life is like for the beautiful people of the village) and the messy, bloody reality of Sara’s existence. The film is bright and hot as befits southwestern Spain, with lots of vivid color through the first two acts, giving way to muddy grays and browns and light barely seeping its way in through filthy windows and plastic tarps as everything comes to a head. It’s a town preparing for a festival, with bad things happening out in the dark. It’s also shot in an almost-square aspect ratio that subtly conveys a feeling of being trapped or confined, emphasizing the pressures that Sara exists under. Everything presses in around her.

This isn’t a movie that jumps out and yells at you - most of the violence is offscreen until the end, it sets its premise up early and then lets it play out mostly in bits of gradual discovery and quiet escalation. Maybe too quiet, really - the second act spins its wheels a little, saving the real tension for the third act. And here is where I feel like it sort of stumbles, as it resolves everything in a way that has been done dozens of times before in similar confrontations. I wish it had come up with something a little less pat and a little less obvious, because it’s a film that’s not afraid to show its teeth elsewhere, and it’s too bad because it was pretty thoughtful getting to that point. There was potential to really say something about the façade of polite society and how it makes excuses for victimizing the marginalized, how people like Sara are only as valuable as they are useful in the moment. I wish it had found the courage to show us the raw, messy stuff of which people are made.

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