Never talk to strangers
Piggy (Cerdita, in Spanish) is a 2022 rural horror film directed and written by Carlota Pereda, based on the 2018 award-winning short film of the same name.Sara (Laura Galán) is an overweight teenager who is bullied by the cool girls—Maca, Roci, and Claudia— in her small town. One day, she decides to go to the pool at a time she expects it to be deserted, hoping to cool off and be left alone. The mean girls show up to torment her some more, call her "Piggy" and other insults, and run off with her belongings, forcing her to walk home in her bathing suit. A mysterious stranger offers her the opportunity to turn the tables on her abusers, and Sara must make a choice.
Tropes present in this movie include:
- Accomplice by Inaction: Claudia stands by and watches as her friends nearly drown Sara who begs for her help. This backfires big time when Sara witnesses her kidnapping. Claudia bangs on the van's window and begs for Sara's help but Sara leaves her for dead and does nothing to cooperate in the investigation that follows when the girls are reported missing. She denies being at the pool and does not say anything about the man who abducted her bullies.
- Adults Are Useless: Sara calls out her mother for doing absolutely nothing about her bullying.
- Agony of the Feet: Sara steps on broken glass while barefoot in the Stranger's hideout.
- Alpha Bitch: Out of the three girls who bully Sara, Maca is the ringleader.
- Anger Born of Worry: The parents of the missing girls are going nuts with worry and search for the girls themselves. Claudia's mother confronts Sara, suspecting she knows something about it. Sara's mother has to intervene.
- Animal Motifs: Pigs. Sara is called "piggy", her family owns a butcher's shop, and her bullies are imprisoned in a slaughterhouse.
- Asshole Victim: The stranger begins targeting people who have been mean to Sara and it's hard to feel too sorry for them, especially the girls who nearly killed her. The worst of them is Maca who is the only girl to die.
- Bait-and-Switch: At the end, after Sara kills the man who abducted her bullies (and killed one of them), she points the shotgun toward the girls and shoots... at the chains holding them up, choosing to let them live. Then she walks away.
- Barely-There Swimwear: Sara's already skimpy string bikini looks even skimpier on someone of her weight as Maca cruelly points out.
- Because You Were Nice to Me: While walking home in her bathing suit, Sara encounters a white van. She sees Claudia inside the van, banging on the window and begging her for help. She catches the stranger's eye. He drops her stolen clothes on the ground without saying anything. She just waves at him, as if saying thanks, letting him drive away.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Claudia initially seems nicer than the other mean girls but she does nothing to stop her friends from nearly drowning Sara and even steals her towel.
- Bittersweet Ending: Maca is dead; the waitress and the lifeguard have also been killed. Roci and Claudia survive, but Claudia had her hand shot off and both girls must be traumatized. And there is no guarantee Sara won't be bullied again, even if Roci and Claudia learn their lesson. But by sparing the girls, Sara has taken some control over her life.
- Boobs-and-Butt Pose: A promotional poster
portrays a blood-spattered Sara standing by the stranger's van in this pose. - Bridal Carry: How the stranger carries Sara away from the wreckage after his van hits a bull.
- Bring Me My Brown Pants: When Sara realizes that the stranger who just abducted her bullies has seen her, she wets herself.
- Bullying a Dragon: Roci still thinks she can get away with calling Sara "Piggy/Cerdita" when she's chained up and defenseless while Sara has a shotgun within easy reach and has just overpowered and killed the man who kidnapped her and Claudia right in front of them.
- Cement Shoes: When Sara submerges herself in the pool to escape her bullies, she fails to notice the lifeguard's corpse. It appears to have been weighed down.
- Complaining About Rescues They Don't Like: After Sara kills the stranger who abducted the trio of girls who bullied her, the surviving girls ask her to untie them. Roci calls Sara "Piggy" again, just like she did earlier.
- Covers Always Lie: The aforementioned poster shows a bloody, bikini-clad Sara standing by the white van. She doesn't get bloody until much later in the film and she's both fully clothed and indoors when it happens.
- Establishing Character Moment: For the stranger, the moment when Sara, who was hoping for the pool to be deserted, without noticing that there is someone else until she turns around. At first she is shocked to see a stranger, but relaxes visibly when she realizes that he is not gawking at her, but rather looking at her like she is just another person. Of course, that's when the mean girls show up and ruin everything.
- Fan Disservice: Sara shows a lot of her body but the context is often too unsettling to fully appreciate it.
- Gone Swimming, Clothes Stolen: The mean girls mock Sara, call her "Piggy", and run away with her clothes and towel. Sara has to walk home wearing nothing but a very skimpy bikini.
- Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: Subverted. The blonde Claudia initially seems nicer than her friends but she is still complicit in Sara's bullying.
- Improbable Infant Survival: Sara's younger brother isn't even injured during the killer's attack.
- Karma Houdini: The teenage boys who harass and assault Sara on her walk home are arguably even worse than the girls but get off relatively easy.
- Kick the Dog: The trio of girls bullying Sara at the pool. In case the audience had doubts about them being mean, they film the incident and post it online to humiliate Sara even more.
- Masturbation Means Sexual Frustration: Protagonist Sara, who is constantly bullied for being fat, masturbates while reminiscing about the stranger who abducted her bullies and returned her stolen clothes.
- No Name Given: The mysterious stranger who abducts Sara's bullies is billed in the credits as "Desconocido" (Stranger).
- Post-Stress Overeating: Sara is seen gorging herself with sweets from a secret stash when she is stressed.
- Shower of Awkward: Downplayed; Sara seems to have no embarrassment at her mother seeing her naked when the latter interrupts her shower, merely expressing annoyance while making no effort to cover herself.
- Sickening Slaughterhouse: The Stranger takes Sara to one after they hit a bull and Sara loses consciousness. It's where Sara encounters Roci and Claudia, bound and gagged and begged by her to release them, and later, comes across Maca's corpse.
- Standard Female Grab Area: When Sara is given a chance by the stranger to kill her bullies, she acts out against him by attempting to stab him using the knife in her hands. However, he immediately grabs her by the arm and takes her down easily.
- Title Drop: The insulting nickname the mean girls call Sara, Cerdita ("Piggy"). Even at the ending, when Roci and Claudia are pleading Sara to untie them, Roci calls her "Piggy". And then Sara picks up the shotgun...
- Too Dumb to Live: Calling Sara "Piggy" while tied up when Sara has a gun seems like a good way to get yourself killed. Of course, Roci may have just been too traumatized to think straight.
- Trauma Conga Line: Sara goes to the pool, hoping it will be deserted so she can swim without being gawked at. But a trio of mean girls ruin her afternoon, making fun of her, calling her names, and nearly drowning her. Then they run off with her clothes, forcing Sara to walk home in her bikini. On top of that, two teenage boys drive by, harassing her verbally and physically. By the time she encounters the Stranger, she is a Broken Bird.
- Uncertain Doom: Sara's parents are last seen bleeding on the floor. Their wounds don't appear to be fatal but their ultimate fate is left ambiguous.
- Weight Woe: Sara is mocked mercilessly by the cool girls in her town for being fat. Her own mother chooses a terrible moment to put her on a diet.
- What You Are in the Dark: Sara has two moments of this, one at the beginning, and one at the end.
- At the beginning of the film, she's alone when she notices the bullies are being abducted. She chooses to ignore it and pretends she was never near the pool that day.
- At the end of the film, after killing the stranger, Sara is alone in the slaughterhouse with the two remaining bullies and the loaded shotgun. No one knows where they are, she could do whatever she liked to the bullies and no one would ever know. She picks up the shotgun, aims it at the girls... and shoots the ropes holding them up, leaving them alive to make their own way home.
- Would Hurt a Child: The stranger hears Sara's little brother upstairs and is ready to kill him before Sara stops him.
