My Thoughts on Meat Kills
Meat Kills is a rough, grim little movie that makes you sit with the messiness of everyone’s choices. and one that opens itself up in ways that might just surprise you.
It starts with Mirthe (Caro Derkx), who is a young worker at a pig farm who decides to secretly film the horrible conditions inside, before getting caught and fired for using her phone, but once Mirthe brings her footage to the Animal Army, the activist group that’s been waiting for proof of the farm’s abuse, the story finally kicks into motion.
It's also the first Dutch horror film to ever get slapped with an NC-17 rating.
The Animal Army group is led by Nasha (Emma Josten), whose determination walks a thin line between passion and obsession. and the group as a whole feel a bit too proud of their own rebellion as you watch them suit up in their spray-painted pig masks, ready to storm the farm with a reckless energy.
Once the group breaks in, they waste no time in causing some chaos, as they tag the walls, trash the equipment, and torment the farmer’s family, believing they’re sending a powerful message. before the farmer steps into the film like a force of nature, where the violence he unleashes feels like an extension of the life he’s always lived.
As the activists begin to fall one by one, each death is more vicious than the last, and the effects were practical and gritty, and where some of the brutality on show will probably remind you of older European horror films that pushed discomfort over spectacle.
I wouldn’t say the violence shocked me, but I did feel its weight each time the movie slowed down long enough for the characters to understand what kind of nightmare they had walked into.
Even as things get worse, Mirthe never becomes the stereotypical “pure” final girl, as she believes in her cause, but she also isn’t blind to the consequences of how far the Animal Army chose to take their mission.
There are several moments where she looks genuinely conflicted - not only afraid for her life, but disturbed by the fact that she’s part of something that spiraled so quickly beyond control.
We also see Jonathan, who is quiet, unsure, and clearly uncomfortable with the way his father runs both the farm and the family, and the the movie gives him a bit of space to hint at a different path - one he may never fully take, but one he clearly wishes for.
As for the movie’s central idea - “meat is murder” - it’s not subtle, and I never got the sense it wanted to be, as the parallels between animal slaughter and human cruelty are laid out plainly, and normally I don’t really enjoy films that hammer their message, but here the lack of subtlety seemed deliberate.
The story shows a world where everyone believes they’re justified, and everyone becomes destructive in the process, and while it’s not a comforting idea, but I thought it worked in context.
By the time the film reaches its final stretch, you're not really exactly rooting for any particular outcome, and you are just observing the collapse of every side - activists, farmers, family members - and feeling a strange mix of sympathy and frustration with all of them - no easy moral victories here, where nobody’s a hero, and nobody walks away clean.
Meat Kills moves quickly, and it doesn’t pretend to be anything it’s not, as it balances shock with just enough emotional grounding to keep everything from feeling empty.
It’s messy, it’s harsh, and it has a point of view - even when that point of view is wrapped in blood and broken metal.