Gunda review: This portrait of farm life becomes a stealth porcine soap opera

Dir: Viktor Kossakovsky. Cert PG, 93 mins

Gunda begins with a pig – just an ordinary pig, its proud snout stuck halfway out of its weather-worn hutch. Russian documentarian Viktor Kossakovsky has chosen to capture his experimental, non-narrative portrait of farm life in crisp, high-contrast black and white. It allows for an exquisite burst of texture, from the sharp splinters jutting out of the wood grain, to the coarse but airy tufts of hair that gather at the pig’s ears.

But to label Gunda as a purely non-narrative feature feels misleading, even if it’s totally bereft of voiceovers or explanatory title cards. There is a rising tension in the film’s first few minutes, as viewers are left to solve the mystery of what’s twitching at the back of the pig’s hutch, in its deepest dark. Suddenly, a piglet bursts forth – we are, in fact, silent witnesses to a birth. Soon enough, Alexander Dudarev’s intricately designed soundscape descends into a clangour of squeals as these new creatures – wobbling, shivering, overwhelmed by the newness of life – rush to their mother’s teat.

What’s so remarkable about Gunda is not only how beautifully Kossakovsky renders these humble surroundings, but how much drama he manages to excavate from the daily toing and froing of farmyard life. There’s a stealth porcine soap opera at work here. As the piglets grow, so their personalities and internal hierarchy mature. Any perceived weakness threatens to expose them as the runt of the litter – and there are consequences for it, as seen in a brutal sequence where a piglet is crushed underneath the weight of its mother’s hoof. Its cries of pain are almost unbearable. The sow, unmoved, barely flinches.

Is this deliberate punishment? An accident? Kossakovsky makes no attempt to anthropomorphise or pathologise the behaviour of his subjects. His camera stays ever-present at their eye level and limits itself to the boundaries of their world. The presence of humans is felt purely through the products of their industry – wire fences, ear tags, and tractors. Only in a single shot do we perceive the shadow of a boot.

The choice allows for a few wonderfully surreal moments. A pair of gates open magically by themselves, introducing to the film a new set of characters: a herd of cows. As they all flood out, bouncing and joyful, the scene becomes suggestive of a post-apocalyptic landscape where livestock have inherited the earth. Gunda even touches on the primordial when it introduces a third set of animals, chickens that loom so large in the camera lens that it's impossible not to be reminded of their ancestors, the velociraptor. All that’s missing are the swells of John Williams’s Jurassic Park theme.

But the film’s self-made fantasy – it was shot in multiple locations across Norway, Spain and the UK – is short-lived. In one sudden, emotionally (though not literally) violent sequence, we are reminded of the system these lives are bound to, as Kossakovsky’s environmentalist message quietly steps to the fore. Actor and activist Joaquin Phoenix executive produced the film for good reason. Though it never passes judgement on the viewer, nor sets forth any kind of demands, the film lends a necessary moral weight to the cycles of birth and death that mankind has placed under its control.