Most of us would probably give up a whole year of our lives to spend just one more day as an innocent child, lost in the wonders of imagination and play. Right? Care-free, reckless, good times with old toys and schoolyard friends. Those were good times … for most of us at least. For others, those heydays of traveling into daydreams and fantasy weren’t just adventures to pass time. They were an escape, a place where demons born from trauma trampled and those struggling with bravery could metaphorically stand and fight to survive or shrivel in defeat.
That’s a theme visited often in movies like this, where the challenges of growing up take the form of something quite fantastical, where balancing imagination and reckoning define the gap between childhood and innocence lost. Here, it’s with a deeply sentimental story that is not without its hiccups, made memorable by it honest characters, clever visuals, and an earnest attempt to give pain a sense of purpose. It’s I Kill Giants.
WHAT IT’S ABOUT: In a seaside town on Long Island, young teenager Barbara Thorson (Madison Wolfe) is a hunter. In the woods, on the shore, around town, she lays traps and lures, trying to find and hold back enemies from attacking her town. They are giants, she says, creatures older than history, held to the horizon by her efforts, a struggle only she endures.
Her life is not easy. She is being raised by her older sister (Imogen Poots), who is barely holding the family together, and while Barbara slips further into her belief of monsters, she becomes the target of bullies and harbors a growing discontent for school. She is soon befriended by a new girl in town, Sophia (Sydney Wade), who tries to understand Barbara’s obsession with the giants while the school therapist, Mrs. Mollé (Zoe Saldana) warms to a girl clearly in need of help.
REVIEW: Director Anders Walter‘s adaptation of the comic book series by Joe Kelly and Ken Niimura is not what it might look like, the film decidedly lacking in giants, the ones that do show up murky and shrouded in fog, though their impact is no less harrowing. I won’t for moment hint at what they are and why then come for Barbara but it is rewarding for what it is, even emotional by its end, thanks to its commitment to the girl’s stark reality.
It makes for a long journey, devoting great patience to Barbara’s growth and the few relationships that have influence on her, yet nothing seems wasted. Wolfe is well cast and entirely convincing, as is Wade and of course, the always watchable Saldana. This isn’t particularly deep, and you’ll most likely see where it’s going earlier than the film wants you to, but that doesn’t weaken too much of the punch it’s after, even as it pads its end beyond where it should. While it might not be what some will hope, this is, nonetheless, a small but gentle story of life.
THAT MOMENT IN: Barbara isn’t like most kids, avoiding television and video games, spending most of her time working on Dungeons & Dragons maps and cataloging what she’s learned about the giants hiding in the world. As such, she hasn’t got any friends but plenty of enemies, bullied almost every day for being a freak. She doesn’t go out of her way to be less a target though, wearing raggedy bunny ears to school that she claims honors her spirit animal. Good thing it’s not an elephant.
Fortunately, there is Sophia, who is a bundle of curiosity and eager to make new friends. But what a handful Barbara becomes, her wild stories about giants and traps keeping Sophia involved but somewhat at a distance. Meanwhile, there is an obvious darkness hovering about Barbara, one that we sense is growing worse and the school therapist must confront.
She is Mrs. Mollé, a soft spoken but candid young woman, who decides it’s time to break Barbara’s shell and discover what keeps her so distant from everyone and why she seems to act so strangely. Needless to say, her first attempts at this go badly, including her misunderstanding of a word that she eventually comes to find out is a name; one that not only means something to Barbara, but is clue to much that haunts her. It’s actually one of the more clever bits in all this.
Finally, after reviewing the child’s file and learning more on her own, Mrs. Mollé confronts Barbara about the giants she spends so much time considering, including a series of drawings and diagrams that stuff the inside of a folder. Mrs. Mollé treats them as fantasy, cartoon characters in old animation and such, nothing all too scary. But this is not what giants are to Barbara. They are not amusing figures from fables and legends. They are instead, as she so painfully describes, hate. They take everything from you, stripping away all that is good.
Barbara explains this sitting in a room alone across from Mrs. Mollé, the child shattered by the need to reveal what she knows all too well. It’s a rare moment for the girl, who is in defense all the time, constantly aware of her vigilance, literally scanning horizons for monsters, tending to her many traps. In this small space, her walls tempered by the trust she’s slowly built with the therapist, she lets loose her true feelings of these beasts that until then she has accounted for only with a rather sterile civility, her duty to defeat them.
I like what Wolfe does with Barbara here, swaddled in heavy clothes, her tangled hair snaking out of a loose cap, her sunken, tearful eyes framed behind thick glasses. She doesn’t overly-play this, something that would surely be tempting to do. Instead, there is an exhaustion to her voice, a fear as well, her timid, shaken words betraying just how badly these giants have wounded her. That’s made doubly impactful by Saldana’s wonderfully sensitive reaction, where she makes it clear how deeply Mrs. Mollé finally understands.
And we do, too. This is when we realize the truth about Barbara, even if we want something else, just as Mrs. Mollé makes her breakthrough, devastating as it. And it works because the film refuses to make this big, flat out denying the moment a juicy, bombastic emotionally wrought scene of weeping and hugging. Instead, letting the quiet distance between the two characters bond in near silence, where Barbara reveals, with her secret weapon, what her intent is all along. It’s a like a thump in the chest.
HEADING FOR THE CREDITS: While I Kill Giants might not quite do as it hopes, there is some real magic here, drawing parallels to the wonder of titles like The NeverEnding Story and A Monster Calls. Barbara is a grounded, sympathetic character that many of us will feel greatly connected with, making this an experience very powerful and maybe a little hopeful. After all, we each have giants.