I KILL GIANTS REVIEW: A DARK, FANTASY FILM FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY…

Are you supplied with tissues for this one? Because you need them. An adaptation of the graphic novel about a young girl who anthropomorphizes her pain in order to do battle against it. ‘I Kill Giants’ is a dark piece of work for children, which is far from a bad thing.

This excellent little Indie film is based on a graphic novel by Joe Kelly and Ken Niimura and directed by the Danish film-maker Anders Walter, who won an Oscar in 2014 for his short film Helium. From the outset, there is a heart-sinking sense of deja vu. JA Bayona’s recent movie A Monster Calls – about a child retreating from emotional pain into CGI fantasy – had a certain storytelling force.

But this dramatic feature is similar to A Monster Calls, with emotion, drama, and a young girls determination to save herself, her family and friends from… giants!

In the opening scene of this movie, a teenage girl walks around in a gray-blue forest, seeking something. She finds it—a clump of mushrooms growing at the foot of a thick tree. She gets out a pocket knife and scrapes some of the green mold off of its top. After putting the red mold into a plastic bottle filled with red liquid, she puts in a Gummi Bear as well. This concoction, we soon learn, is “Giant Bait.”

Madison Wolfe plays Barbara, a lonely and troubled girl who regularly roams through the nearby forest hunting for “giants”, which we periodically get to see – sub-Iron-Giant/dementors, Titans (but not the heavily-inked Japanese anime Titans).

But there is no question of us, the audience, finding them scary or dramatic in the sense that Barbara does, because naturally we understand immediately that they are delusional fantasies, part of the young girl’s troubled way of life that has got her bullied at school for being a weirdo. Her elder sister, Karen (Imogen Poots), fixes her meals at night.

At first, the girl registers to viewers as a particularly avid devotee of D&D-style role-playing games. Although she’s not particularly keen on sharing her enthusiasms.

Approached on a nearby beach by Sophia (Sydney Wade), a transplant from Leeds, England, Barbara pays back curiosity with rudeness before allowing that Sophia has a pretty name.

But Barbara is more than a D&D gamer: when she insists that her life’s work is killing giants, she’s not talking about a persona that she adopts in leisure time. The rabbit ears that she wears as a kind of crown AND NOT a fashion statement. She really believes that the ratty purse she clutches to herself as she navigates, or fails to navigate, the banal troubles waiting around the corner of every school corridor, actually contains a giant-smiting storm hammer.

With a vocabulary well advanced for her years, a frank disdain for stupid people (“Most people are stupid”), and a penchant for wearing soiled bunny ears as a tribute to her spirit guide, Barbara is not the most popular of girls. She’s a frequent target of the school bully in blue eye shadow.

The wonderful, Zoe Saldana plays her superciliously sorrowing sympathetic school counsellor, Mrs Mollé. New to the gig, Mrs. Mollé, is making it her job to figure out what’s happening to her.

In the meantime, the giants appear to both Barbara and the audience. These giants are true horrors: Among other vivid atrocities, some of them use human kidney as a garnish when they eat reindeer. It’s up to Barbara, with the help of a secret weapon she has named “Coveleski” for personal reasons that will become apparent and important, to stop them—that is, if she can be brave enough.

They are somewhat formidable but also a tad familiar. The same could be said for the movie itself. “I Kill Giants” is the feature debut of Anders Walter, who has a reasonably deft hand with both fantastic and realistic elements of CGI in film.

But…

So what is the cause of Barbara’s “giants”?

It turns out to be extremely straightforward. There is no good reason for everyone not to be talking openly about it all the time. But this explanation is coyly withheld from us through a dishonest narrative (boo-hoo) until virtually the last moment, creating fake mystery and fake jeopardy (which is a great shame, really, because Madison Wolfe has put a lot of effort into creating a character we want to win, but at times, feels as if we just don’t really care, if she prevails!)

FINAL REVIEW:

Much like its protagonist, I Kill Giants moves to its own rhythm, one rather slow for a film targeted at a young audience. But that’s so much the better, because the first two-thirds of the film are terrific: atmospheric and tightly structured, revealing its information regarding Barbara’s life and family history crumb by insightful crumb.

In fact, the film is so smartly structured and affecting over its first half-and-change, it’s almost too bad when the climax occurs and its “moral” is stated so darn explicitly.

3.5/5 stars