Gunda: Movie Review

Director: Victor Kossakovsky

There's no denying the black and white doco Gunda about a Norwegian pig won't be for everyone.

A lack of soundtrack other than natural noises, no car chases or explosions and no dialogue mean it's a shoo-in for the arthouse crowd and will likely be overlooked by those wondering how 93 minutes can pass in the life of a pig.

But that's to dismiss what Kossakovsky wants to do here.

Granted, there's an agenda from this documentary-maker, but subtlety is the crowbar of use here, not blatant messaging.

From an opening shot that centres on Gunda snorting and laying down her porky head poking out of a wooden farmhouse, straw strewn all around, this doco makes great fist of its black and white ethos, its sumptuous close ups and its ambition to detail life on a farm from a pig's point of view.

As the camera pans back, Gunda's piglets clamber over here, and a new life begins for many of them. Animal-level camera work captures a ground eye view of the life of a hog, and the desperate struggle for survival for the piglets as they fight to get to the teats.

But this is no Attenborough-style polemic exhorting us to not eat meat (though given the camera lavishes love on chickens and cows, it's hard to ignore the subtleties of what Kossakovsky wants to say), it's more a look at how beautiful animal life can be.

From slow-mo shots to close ups of a one-legged chicken, Kossakovsky is interested in showing the humanity of the animals without turning them into twee Babe knockoffs with cute voices and a narrative arc to follow.

There is a narrative here, but that narrative is simply one of nature taking its course - though you'd be a fool to not see where this is going.

Humanity barely features in the film until the final devastating moments - a scene of a pig terrified and running from a tractor pulling up signifies more than any words or actions can. And the final moments of Gunda itself are utterly haunting, if you've invested in the prior 90 or so minutes.

That's the thing with Gunda - it requires a bit of an investment from its viewers, and an adjustment to its rhythms. Feeling like a weird webcam experiment, this is beautifully shot and uses its black and white lense to perfection, catching dancing sunbeams to frame its subjects to eye-wateringly good effect.

Gunda may make you think twice about some choices, and perhaps that's the intention. If there is an agenda here, it's presented in its purest unfiltered glory, which makes it worth watching - nature has never looked better, and the choices we make seem much starker and harder to justify.