Review: Boar

Director: Chris Sun

Screenplay: Kristy Dallas and Chris Sun

Year: 2019

Synopsis: In a remote area of Australia lives a fierce and huge beast that defends its territory with violence and destruction. A family goes on vacation close to the area were this beast lives, making an encounter imminent. 

A horror movie about a wild boar wreaking havoc in a prairie may sound absurd when you first hear it. When you know that this movie is set in the Outback of Australia it becomes a lot less absurd. If you have ever seen news or documentaries about the kind of animals that inhabit this island-continent, an overgrown pig seems like no big deal.

In “Boar”, a family goes on vacation to visit a relative in a remote area of Australia. For their bad luck, their visit coincides with a series of strange events in the place, like broken fences, dead livestock and even dead people. These events seem to be the work of a wild overgrown boar.

“Boar” is mainly a creature feature with some parts resembling more a slasher movie. Initially, along with the story of the protagonists, some other stories are developed, but these just have the intention of serving as tension relief with some comedy, or to increase the body count. These stories are also used to develop the boar character giving some information about what has been happening and exposing more characters to it.

In these scenes, the savage and ruthless nature of the boar is revealed. As expected from director Chris Sun ("Charlie’s Farm"), the encounters between the boar and the people are shown in a gruesome and creative way. The design of the boar is phenomenal, offering an imposing and blood-thirsty creature. Often it is presented using well-crafted practical effects that gives plenty of realism to it, but some fast-paced scenes are done using CGI, significantly less effective and that ends up being detrimental for the overall quality of the movie.

The screenplay of Kristy Dallas and Chris Sun presents several stories, and this ends up doing more harm than good. The purpose of this is to give the boar more exposition and have more death scenes, but the time used to develop these stories end up under developing the characters of the protagonist family. The acting lead by Bill Moseley ("The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2"), Nathan Jones ("Mad Max: Fury Road"), and Simone Buchanan ("Patrick"), although fairly good, do not manage to create interesting characters. Only Jones in his interpretation of Bernie has enough developed for you to care about him and this has his reward when he inevitably meets the boar.

Because of its original content, gore scenes, and the design of the boar, I wanted to like this movie more than what I did. Developing several parallel stories create an inconsistent rhythm and makes the protagonist, except for Bernie, be uninteresting, Still, “Boar” is a very good creature feature, with a well done and well-used monster and excellent action and gore scenes, hindered by a story that, while not being bad, should have been more focused.