'Okja' Teaser Trailer: Netflix Monster Movie Looks Way More Piggy Than 'The Host'

The first teaser trailer for Okja probably isn’t selling anyone on anything. With a single line from Nancy Mirando — Tilda Swinton as some sort of rogue geneticist — we don’t get a particuarly strong sense of the characters we’ll be following. And all we get of the monster is the side of its face and a silhouette on a computer screen; it looks like a giant teacup pig, basically. But if you’re excited for Okja it probably has nothing to do with the footage. Instead, Okja is so exciting because it’s Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho running absolutely bug-wild with Netflix’s money.

After Mother, his idiosyncratic murder-drama, and landmark monster movie, The Host, Bong nailed one of the trickier crossovers in filmmaking, preserving his vision in an English-language debut. Snowpiercer managed both action schlock and searing, anti-rich politics, giving us an action movie no American studio would dare (leading to the Weinstein’s failed effort to censor and contextualize Snowpiercer). It’s a three-movie run that makes Bong’s next project a must-watch regardless of marketing.

So yeah, hearing Swinton say “I took nature… and science… and I synthesized” and then seeing a pig eye isn’t really redefining movie marketing. But we’re excited anyway.

Though there’s no real sense of the plot of Okja in this first teaser trailer, the upcoming Netflix monster movie is described as a “grand global adventure,” starring Mija (Seo-Hyun Ahn), “a young girl who risks everything to prevent a powerful, multi-national company from kidnapping her best friend - a massive animal named Okja.”

Okja will be available on Netflix June 28.