OKJA – Review

Review by Stephen Tronicek

 People watching Okja will probably find themselves confused and angry. The same could be said about those walking out of Transformers: The Last Knight. The difference is Okja actually wants you to be confused and angry and you shouldn’t take it any other way. What Bong Joon Ho and his group of actors and screenwriters have created is a lopsided film that itself justifies its own lopsidedness, throwing its audience into waters of at one moment discomfort and the another hilarity. Okja, much like the animal at its center is a big, brash, thing of beauty, that can’t help but be loved.

Okja concerns itself with Mija (An Seo Hyun), a young girl who has grown up raising one of supposedly 26 Superpigs, Okja, for the corporation Mirando. However, the ten year period is up now and Mirando wants to harvest, ready to supply the world with delicious Superpig Jerky and a variety of other products. When Ojka is taken, Mija refuses to let her go in peace and soon finds herself mixed up in the business dealings of Lucy Mirando (Tilda Swinton), the CEO of the Mirando corporation, and the actions of a group of activists trying to free Okja and expose Mirando.

If all of this sounds over the top and heavy-handed, that’s because it really is. If Okja lacks for anything, it is subtlety, but because said lack of subtlety is the point of the film, that lack turns out to be a strength in the way it starts to affect the tone. Okja, to keeps its over the top sensibility, quite intentionally shifts its tone in weird lopsided ways, but it does so with purpose. The juxtaposition of said tone against our own conflicted and complicated morality towards the food and product production at the center of the story leads to the film tonally working, forcing us to feel just as conflicted about the shifting tone as we do about events at the center of the film. The film starts out as one of the funniest movies of the year by way of a master satirist like Paul Verhoeven (mine the endings of Robocop and Okja and you’re going to come up with some of the same thematic tissue) but then flies into the nasty image behind said humor. We’re forced to embrace the film’s humor in ignorance and then watch as reality comes crashing in, both ruining the facade, but also shifting the tone to deadly serious. On top of that is layer after layer of audience POV characters each requesting our attention and then forcing us to recontextualize our views on the events of the film. The film has the gall to vault from making the audience laugh at the activists, only to then force them to confront the mind space that had them laughing at the activists in the first place. This is filmmaking of a thrilling sort, manipulation of a thrilling sort. Okja isn’t afraid to spit in the face of its viewers and it’s all the better for that.

That out of the way, this is also a beautiful film, full of expert direction from Bong Joon Ho, a flurry of memorable moments and some of the best off the wall acting you’ll see all year. In order to achieve the tonally askew but with purpose angle the film is going for, the actors and the director had to be up to the task and the names Tilda Swinton, Paul Dano, Lily Collins, Giancarlo Esposito, and Jake Gyllenhaal, should all be enough to make anyone place confidence in anything, and combined with the genius of young actress An Seo Hyun, Okja has more than enough great actors who are all in on the tonal whiplash the movie wishes to place you in. Swinton and Gyllenhaal especially find themselves vaulting from ironically hilarious to terrifying in an instant and both, as expected, pull this off with an almost supernatural skill. Gyllenhaal finds himself chilling to the bone in a way that you haven’t seen since his best turn in Nightcrawler. This may be a close second.

Okja is the type of film that will split audiences. Many will be frustrated by its tonal register and others may find it too heavy-handed, but there will be a few that understand it. There will be a few that marvel at the way it forces one into a trap of their own ignorance and then with astounding ease forces one to recontextualize said ignorance. Okja is cinema at it’s best, lopsided, but with a purpose and just like the beast at its center, I think you’ll come to love it.

5 of 5 Stars

OKJA will be available on Netflix beginning June 28th