© 2026 The Couch Critic
What is 'Pigs' about? 'About a dog's world, about the fact that freedom also engenders filth and stupidity while destroying ideals. Everything has been debased, sullied in mud, thrown into the cesspool,' wrote a reviewer. Such extreme critical reactions were elicited by the film's subject matter and its portrayal of the world as fundamentally castrated of positives and saturated with cynicism, moral dirt and cruelty. A world that is simultaneously hardly abstract, and in fact present in the here and now (i.e. in Poland in 1989), one that is additionally portrayed in an iconoclastic and provocative manner, derisive of all things sacred, be they related to nation or religion.
In good old days Franz Maurer and his partners from secret police used to live like kings. Now, they all must adapt to new post-communist environment where they are scorned and losing all the privileges. Some, like Franz, are like ordinary police fighting against drug dealers. But Franz would soon find that some of his friends are on the other side.
Franz Maurer, a compromised cop, former officer of the criminal department of the Warsaw's police, is released from prison where he was doing time for his brutality and murders. He is awaited by Nowy, a former police colleague. Franz tries to go straight starting hard work in a steel mill. Nevertheless, he must leave the factory as a criminal with an uncertain past when he doesn't join the strike organized by the workers' union. At the same time, a merciless war continues in former Yugoslavia. Wolf and William, two high rank officers, come to Poland in order to organize a network selling and smuggling arms to Yugoslavia by way of Albania.
Having spent years in prison, Franz Maurer is released and goes out into a new Poland, where nothing is as he remembered it to be. Who and what is waiting for the man who, for the last 25 years... hasn’t been doing anything? How will he find himself in a world where old principles and loyalty have ceased to exist? We will get to know that when fate reunites Franz and “Nowy”. Their meeting will change everything.