Danielle Solzman
Pig Hag is a film that lends a new perspective for what it means to be a woman and have so many expectations be placed upon you because of gender.
Jodie (Anna T. Schlegel) does not have it easy. This is a woman who deals with a lot of harassment over texts and whatnot. Much of the harassment comes by way of text messages from Mitch Internet. It’s fascinating how the filmmakers choose to use Internet has a last name. After all, this is a person who could stand in for all the evil trolls in existence.
It’s not just this troll but she’s also facing harassment by her own family members. Nobody said you can choose your family but one would expect family to behave in a friendly manner. In any event, Jodie lives for looking through the photos on social media. She’s not getting any younger and as she approaches 40, Jodie doesn’t know if she’ll ever meet the right man. Pretty soon, she’ll be at an age in which she won’t be able to have kids because the plumbing will stop working. Never mind the all-too-common stereotype of how awful men can be. Yes, I know there are good men out there but it, umm, goes against the grain of the story that Pig Hag is trying to tell.
Things change when Jodie meets Dustin (Tony Jaksha) during a Guns N’Roses concert. Jodie thinks that Dustin is the one but he never gets in touch with her the next day. Cue the emotional breakdown and her best gay friends (Maxwell Esposito, Michael Henry, Pete Zias) enter the picture. None of them have names at all. As lazy as not giving them names may be, they’re here to serve the purpose of the story. In which case, it’s getting Jodie to calm down.
The search to find the love of your life is not an easy one. Make no mistake that this is a pressure that’s placed upon us from the day that we’re born. I’m transgender so I know what the pressure is like to conform to those societal standards especially in a religious community.
Even in the amount of media that I’ve consumed over the years, there’s a number of outrageous standards that get placed on women as a whole. Pig Hag comes off as a film that tries to subvert the standards that society places on women.
DIRECTORS: Colby Holt and Sam Probst
SCREENWRITER: Colby Holt
CAST: Anna T. Schlegel, Tony Jaksha, Maxwell Esposito, Michael Henry, Pete Zias
