It's truffle season baby, but first Nic Cage needs to find his pig.

Picture this.

The phone rings.

“Hey Nic, it’s your Bob, your agent. Call me when you get this. Any chance you could dive into veganism for the next six months? Just until prep, shooting, and press is over? I know it’s in your contract to have IN-OUT catered, but the studio is willing to give you more money if you can eat tofu for the sake of the film's image. Call me.”

Thirty minutes later the phone rings again.

“Bob, how much more?”

“Fifty million.”

“I’m vegan.”

Click.

‘Pig’, to be released July 16—which is also my half birthday (I take checks and cash)—stars Nicolas Cage and Alex Wolf, directed by Micheal Sarnoski and based on the story by Vanessa Block. When I first saw the trailer, I snorted (no pun intended). A little too hard. My first thought was, “Come on, do we really need another classic revenge story over a missing truffle-hunting pig?”

I can see the ‘SNL’ sketch now. Enter Keanu Reeves saying, “You killed my dog!” Then Liam Neeson, with “They took my daughter,” followed by Mr. Cage, with what will undoubtedly become the film's famous line, “WHO TOOK MY PIG?” Zoom out on all three of them, looking like they just finished the major action scenes for ‘John Wick’, ‘Taken’, and ‘Pig’. Unshaven, with ripped shirts, unwashed greasy hair, covered in sweat, dirt, and dried blood.

Can you see it?!

However, everything changed within the first fifteen minutes of my viewing. I live in Hollywood, okay? If you don’t have access to screeners you are basically, well, normal. Who wants to be normal when you can live in a world where your next door neighbor is Emma Stone’s bidet cleaner and has a sign out front that says, “I’m Emma Stone’s bidet cleaner”? You’d be crazy not to want this.

So the hands that touch the golden ass-washing-product of Ms. Stone handed me (I hope he washed his hands) my copy of ‘Pig’. He charged me a fortune, which is why I just asked for money for my half birthday. NO VENMO!

Much more than your classic revenge story

The film opens with music from Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 1 in C Major, as the pig discovers a black truffle, which Rob (Nicolas Cage) puts up to his nose and smells. BINGO! It’s a truffle. Well done, pig! Nailed it on his first take. I made that up. But he probably did (I’m scared of PETA). After putting pig into his fancy bedroom (shack and mud), Rob gets knocked out. When he wakes, pig is gone. Immediately the title card comes onto the screen to tell you the film stars “Nicolas Cage, Academy Award Winner.” Almost as if to say, we know this looks like a bad comedy sketch, but this guy won a golden statue, give him and us a chance.

Rob has been living in the wilderness of Oregon, as made obvious by the poster for this film—this man hasn’t seen a bathtub in a hot second. Let me go off the rails for a moment. Only Leonard DiCaprio (‘Revenant’) and Nicolas Cage can be unbathed, dirty, and smelly and still make me want to get naked in front of them and ask them to have my children. Was this inappropriate, Rachel? To those reading this, Rachel is my boss, who is probably emailing me at this very moment to tell me I’m fired. Whatever, they are sexy and they know it.

Where was I? Oh, right. Pig gets taken. Rob is forced to go back to his hometown in Portland, reopening some past wounds, with the help of his friend and fellow truffle salesman, Amir (Alex Wolff) to find the people that took his pig.

When asked by a chef, “why not just buy a new truffle pig?”, Cage says, no, he can’t do that.

"I remember every meal I ever cooked. I remember every person I ever served. You live your life for them, and they don't even see you. You don't even see yourself. We don't get a lot of things to really care about... Who has my pig?"

How far would you go to get something you loved?

Like the many other movies that inspired this one, the main obvious one being ‘John Wick’, this is a revenge movie that stems from loving something deeply. In this case, the movie is a love affair with a pig and his food. I mean, I get it. In clips, we see Rob delicately cooking these salivating meals. You will leave the theater craving winter root vegetables, pinot noir, steak with garlic-roasted potatoes and, you guessed it, truffles. It is shots like these that separate ‘Pig’ from other movies in this genre. It’s more than just your typical Hollywood movie where good guys and bad guys shoot at each other. It’s the raw quiet moments, the score, and the cinematography that make you go, “I think I may need to drop my life, move to the wilderness and buy a pig.”

If you think about it, this movie is very Cage, who describes his acting as “nouveau shamanic.” “What is acting but lying, and what is good lying but convincing lying? I don’t want to look at acting that way. Why not experiment?… Nouveau shamanic is nothing other than trying to augment your imagination to get to the performance without feeling like you’re faking it.”

I could not think of a more needed time to use this method than when your co-star has a snout. The sense of play in his performances is what makes Cage so unique.

This is Sarnoski’s first feature. In an interview to Variety, he describes how this project was a “labor of love'' for him.

“What began as a very personal project has transformed into a labor of love for so many talented people,” Sarnoski said in a statement when the project started filming in Oregon. “I’m thrilled for us all to be bringing this strange world to life.”

“Michael’s vision for ‘Pig’ is a true testament of his unique voice as a writer-director, and one that we can’t wait to introduce to audiences across the world,” added producer and Pulse Films chief Thomas Benski. “Having such an incredible cast attached, led by Nicolas Cage and supported by Alex Wolff, speaks directly to the special nature of the story Michael and Vanessa have devised.”

Alex Wolf and Nicolas Cage have teamed up before, starring in ‘Color Out Of Space’. The bromance continues, as Wolf said in an interview on “Just for Variety” podcast. Wolff said that Cage became one of his “best friends” and “one of the most loyal people in my life” by the end of filming ‘Pig’.

“We talk almost every few days,” he said. “We text all day and he FaceTimed me like two days ago, and we really support each other and help each other with things. We started making the movie when we were both going through very similar personal things in our life and we bonded over it immediately and connected and were very emotionally open with each other. We just became best friends.”

I’m crying.

Long story short, this is a movie I’d recommend even if the SNL writers will have a field day.

‘Pig’, distributed by Neon, opens in theaters July 16. Watch the official trailer for the movie in the video below.