A filmmaker can get himself into trouble when his protagonist is outclassed by a pig, and with eyes full of life’s range of emotion, the little fella acts circle around his costar.

At the beginning of Squeal, we open on director Aik Karapetian’s unnamed protagonist (Kevin Janssens) who is driving through Eastern Europe, to “a country [he’s] never heard of” to reconnect with his estranged father whose name he can’t pronounce. From the start, The Foreigner, as he is billed, evokes zero sympathy. With the hubris typical to horror film travelers, he’s left his language tapes and Lonely Planet guides at home—an act of idiocy that just could lead a fella to a life-altering ordeal of abuse and captivity. Among the litany of ill-advised decisions so familiar to fans of the subgenre, The Foreigner one-ups them all when he hits a pig with his car.

Thankfully, the pig is unharmed. Its owner’s daughter Kirke (Laura Silina), on the other hand, is pretty pissed and enjoins Foreigner to return the pig to her tiny farming village. The bucolic grounds recall Midsommar’s communal setting minus any and all trappings of folk horror. As to the residents, they appear to have wandered off the Hostel set after changing into clean boots and barn jackets.

“A pig,” Gustavs tells The Foreigner, who can’t understand a word his captor says, “has no choice.” Branded, ears clipped, and hung writhing on a hook is not the life a sentient being signs up for. And just like a pig, the Foreigner is helpless as Squeal subverts farm hierarchies by turning him into a beast of burden made to shovel shit and feed slop to the pigs—a meal he must share with his Sus domesticus cousins. Chained to an iron collar in a rancid barn, The Foreigner’s suffering might turn viewers off to eating pigs for good. (I know it happened to me with Italians after I saw The Godfather.)

Despite his growing affection for and identification with the animals, Foreigner looks only slightly dismal when one is slaughtered. The real waterworks kick in when the original pig sticks his snout through the fence and murmurs “Mother” to the gory stack of entrails. Conveying both the grief farm animals endure on a daily basis and stealing a page from Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, it’s the pivotal moment wherein the film tilts into the surreal. (“Chaos reigns.”)

Perfunctory internet searches invariably pigeonhole Squeal as a fairy tale. Despite the critics’ numberless comparisons to Hansel and Gretel, the film’s only move toward the romantic comes when Foreigner—having rescued the pigs from the burning stable—is embraced by the locals and forced to marry Kirke. (After writing that, it doesn’t sound so romantic.) Fetters unchained and a brand-new bride who’s already proven herself utterly untrustworthy, is it possible that The Foreigner has more love and trust for the pig he has saved?

As if to further distract from Jurgis Kmins’ extraordinary cinematography, a voice-over offers bullsh*t insight into the protagonist’s “journey” as though it were a mythical trial by fire and not a story about how he was locked up and communed with pigs. A fairy tale this is not, and the narration is just one more element that, rather than clarify the film’s intent, serves only to further muddle genres.

With its occasional, desperate pretenses to pseudo-arthouse, Squeal’s hopes to achieve anything beyond a quotidian captive-escape yarn amounts to snide arrogance on the part of Karapetian, who should know better than to dress up an Inbred-style captive film as anything more than it is.

2 out of 10