If Netflix’s foray into original television content has been one of the great, industry-shaking developments of the past decade, the streaming service’s attempts at evergreen feature films have been decidedly less successful. Though the site has flourished with original documentaries (13th; What Happened, Miss Simone?; and Get Me Roger Stone are just three critically lauded examples), big-budget features such as David Michôd’s War Machine and Yuen Woo-Ping’s Crouching Tiger sequel have made less of a splash.
That might change with The Host director Bong Joon-Ho’s latest picture, a strange, sweeping cautionary tale of late-capitalist greed called Okja, available on Netflix worldwide.
The title of the film is the name of its semi-anthropomorphic, genetically engineered Superpig, several of which have been created by the Mirando Corporation to be bred, commodified and slaughtered for consumption. The Superpig, a simpler name for what looks like the lovechild of an elephant and a dugong, is being raised in the South Korean countryside with a young girl named Mija (Ahn Seo-hyun) who, in the tradition of films such as Pan’s Labyrinth and Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro, strikes up a touching friendship with the gentle giant.
But all of this is part of a larger, more sinister undertaking to bring “harvest to the world”, as Tilda Swinton’s cunning, brace-toothed CEO announces, having taken the reins at her family’s multinational agrochemical firm. Working with her is Johnny Wilcox, a debauched TV zoologist played by Jake Gyllenhaal, who aids Mirando’s scheme by filming highly editorialized specials about the Superpigs’ wholesome upbringing.
Dr Johnny and Swinton’s Lucy Mirando plan to ship the best and brightest of their mutant swine back to the company’s headquarters in Manhattan, where they’ll be unveiled to the world and then repackaged as beef jerky, bacon and hot dogs “as edible as apple pie”. Fighting to expose the company’s cruel practices is a team of young bandits known as the Animal Liberation Front, headed by Paul Dano’s Jay and Lily Collins’ Red, who despite a language barrier team up with Mija to save Okja from her inevitable end: the slaughterhouse.
Bong’s film is indeed as weird as the sum of its parts – crammed in less than two hours is a bonkers scene with projectile excrement, Gyllenhaal talking almost exclusively in a drunken, high-pitched squeal, a getaway pig-napping and heavy satire of both the heartless corporatists and the beleaguered activists – but its last 20 minutes are as affecting as anything I’ve seen in film this year.
Audiences at this year’s Cannes film festival, in part, seemed to agree. When Okja premiered there last month it was met with both admiration and rancor, the former directed at the film for its warmth and visual splendor, the latter at the Netflix logo that appeared in the title cards, prompting boos from the caustic French crowd. Cannes, like other film festivals, has been slow to embrace the advent of streaming services, which tend to eschew theatrical releases and opt instead for online debuts.
Okja – written by Bong and journalist/author Jon Ronson, whose last film credit was the delightfully strange 2014 film Frank – will subvert this process just slightly, set to open on 28 June, the day of its streaming release, in just three US theaters, qualifying the film for awards season contention (Netflix and its counterpart Amazon have not been shy about gunning for Oscars, both companies having earned their first ever wins at last year’s ceremony).
In France, though, where movies can only appear online 36 months after being released theatrically, such a rollout is outlawed and, in the eyes of traditionalist cinephiles, uncouth. Even the National Federation of French Cinemas, in protecting the interests of film exhibitors, went as far to say that online-only distribution would “call into question their nature as a cinematographic work”, a stance that’s as anachronistic as it is smug.
But with Okja, Bong Joon-ho was less concerned with these rituals – which have the ultimate effect of arbitrarily ascribing value to some films and not others – than with having complete creative control over the project, which Netflix famously affords.
“There’s no mechanism to make a movie like Okja today outside of what we’re doing,” Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, told the Telegraph. “No studio would take that risk on a Korean director on a film that barely has any English language in it. And in my opinion while that may sound risky, putting it in the hands of director Bong? Not very risky at all.”
That obeisance to film-makers hasn’t yet landed the streaming service a major feature, but Okja is as good an advertisement as any for the benefits of total directorial freedom, helping to position Netflix as a go-to destination, and financial safety net, for directors looking to to make films that wouldn’t otherwise find a home. In turn, directors such as Bong have extolled the virtues of that autonomy. “If you want to make something strange,” he told the Guardian, “[Netflix] is a good place to go.”
There is, though, an amusing irony to the film’s controversial distribution: Okja, which cost $50m to make, is readymade for the big screen, complete with heist-like drama, a manatee-sized pig and mesmerizing shots of Mija and Okja roaming the South Korean mountaintops. But it’ll almost universally be consumed via laptop screens, iPads and home televisions. Of course most films are nowadays, their digital shelf lives being far longer than their theatrical ones.
All of this suggests not only a changing media environment, but Netflix’s understanding that in order to compete with the major studios, it has to sell something that others aren’t willing to. In the case of Okja, Netflix bartered final cut. When Bong worked with Harvey Weinstein on his 2014 epic Snowpiercer, the producer reportedly tried, unsuccessfully, to shave 20 minutes off Bong’s cut. “I don’t hate him,” Bong told the Guardian. “It’s just his style; it’s what he does. Whereas my style is final cut.”
Of course, the final version of Okja contains a brutal slaughterhouse scene that would likely have been nixed in the hands of another production company. Without it, Okja would be merely weird rather than weirdly breathtaking, as Bong patiently shows the jarring, grisly nature with which the Superpigs meet their end; it isn’t polemical, but it certainly takes an otherwise beautiful, eccentric film to a more harrowing place. Its inclusion should ensure that Okja has a lasting effect, if not by forcing us to reconsider where our food comes from than by cementing Netflix as more than an endless repository of old movies and shows.
“If you look at the output of American major movie studios it’s pretty non-risk-oriented,” Jonathan Friedland, Netflix’s chief communications officer, told the Telegraph. “So if there are projects that people have really wanted to make for a while which are risky or different than what people are comfortable with, they’re not finding a home, which has opened up a tremendous opportunity for us to come in and do that.”
So far the service’s originals have, to an extent, reflected those efforts. First came Cary Fukanaga’s Beasts of No Nation, a war drama set in west Africa other studios refused to touch that netted Idris Elba a Golden Globe nomination. Then, as part of its deal with Adam Sandler, who had become box office poison, Netflix distributed both the Ridiculous 6 and The Do Over, critically panned but widely watched comedies (collectively, they’ve racked up over half a billion streams).
But Sarandos’ plans, thankfully, go well beyond Sandler. In the pipeline for the streaming service are a host of ambitious, big-budget features, some to which it acquired distribution rights and others financed entirely by Netflix. There’s Mudbound, the Dee Rees-directed period drama starring Carey Mulligan, which Netflix purchased at Sundance for $12.5m; Moon director Duncan Jones’ Mute, an ambitious sci-fi thriller with Paul Rudd; Death Note, a film adaptation of the Japanese Manga comics of the same name, set for a late-summer release; the futuristic Bright, Netflix’s biggest bet yet, a $100m fantasy directed by David Ayer and starring Will Smith; and, finally, The Irishman, a mafia movie that was a decade in the making, reuniting Martin Scorsese with Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci.
If the governing bodies of awards shows and festivals don’t take note, fear not: Netflix’s 100 million-strong subscriber base certainly will.
- Okja is now available on Netflix worldwide
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