I Kill Giants Is a Strange, Moving Tale of Childhood Grief and Fantasy
I Kill Giants feels secret and dangerous, like a VHS tape dug out of a dusty crate at a yard sale; it’s the kind of movie you ended up watching every week as a kid just because of how weird it made you feel. The debut feature of director Anders Walter is based on the graphic novel of the same name by Joe Kelly (who also adapted the screenplay), and it’s at once familiar and unsettling, with shades of Pan’s Labyrinth and Return to Oz. But what gives it its chills has less to do with its freaky creatures, and more with the troubled state of its young heroine. Young protagonists escaping into fantasy in the face of traumatic reality is a common theme in children’s fiction, but few films take their heroine’s mental state seriously enough to interrogate it the way I Kill Giants does.
Barbara Thorson (Madison Wolfe) is a wild, moody tween living with her older sister and brother in a state of not-quite-controlled chaos on windswept Long Island. Their parents are absent, for reasons that will come to light over the course of the film. Barbara’s sworn duty is that of a giant slayer; she goes about her business setting traps and creating anti-monster potions to protect the town from a threat they remain blissfully unaware of. Never without a battered pair of rabbit ears (in tribute to her “spirit guide”) she’s a little rain cloud at home despite her sister Karen’s (Imogen Poots) attempts to bond with her, and she’s ostracized and friendless at school. A new girl (Sydney Wade) arrives and is drawn to her eccentricities, and a school counselor (Zoe Saldana) tries to break through to her, but Barbara’s zealousness proves very effective at keeping people out.
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