Great cinematography: nice lenses, a guide how cool to shoot on film, how to create a good composition and then how to edit it all correctly. Just wow!
That's all.
Incredibly boring.
The Giant
2019
Action / Crime / Mystery / Thriller
The Giant
2019
Action / Crime / Mystery / Thriller
Plot summary
A teenager's small town life is changed forever when a series of murders begin on the same night that her missing boyfriend suddenly reappears.
Uploaded by: FREEMAN
November 15, 2020 at 02:13 PM
Director
Tech specs
720p.WEB 1080p.WEBMovie Reviews
great DoP, thanx, that's all.
Mournful music comes to a crescendo while a young woman makes mournful noises
I'm still not sure what I just watched. Was the main girl dead? Was there a meteor storm at the end? Is there an audience for sad girl movies?
Skillfully made. Not for everyone.
It's telling that most of the negative reviews are by people who either didn't watch the film or didn't pay enough attention to review it fully. If you find a very ominous, sometimes slow and surreal style of film making repellant, simply don't watch it. Snarky non-reviews are useless. The film does in fact have a plot but the method of storytelling is non-linear or elliptical (deliberate gaps where you are supposed to jump to a conclusion by yourself).
The protagonist, Charlotte, is a 16 or 17 year old girl from rural Georgia. Her mother committed suicide around a year before the July events of the film which revolve around a group of teens who have just finished high school and like to drink/party, despite the looming spectre of "the giant", an unidentified serial killer who supposedly targets teen girls.
Charlotte was previously involved with an older boyfriend whom she met in 8th grade (~13 years old), Joe. It is heavily implied he is bad news (e.g. She dreams about being strangled and several friends warn her not to look for him) but she is still hung up on him and periodically fantasises about meeting up with him again - he abandoned her shortly after her mother died. She concludes he is, "Broken in ways I can't imagine." She drives around in the dark alone imagining he is still with her whilst glimpsing murder victims on their way somewhere in an identical truck. Charlotte comments that she can barely recognise him. He never appears in any scene with other characters, implying that he specifically haunts Charlotte during her fugue states. He pleads his innocence.
Charlotte visits her old home, dreaming about the day her mother hung herself and their final conversations. She loses time, sleeping for long periods and going missing from her friend group for days with no memory of where she has been. Her father, a state trooper struggles with depression and spends long hours out on the road. The summer air hangs heavy and thunderous rainstorms close in. The 35mm cinematography is very dark with highlights of neon colour or candle light, distorted and stretched during Charlotte's fugue states.
The story reaches a climax when Charlotte agrees to throw a birthday party for Olivia at the old house. Dialogue implies that they both witnessed Joe doing something bad exactly one year ago at a nearby location, down by the water where they swim. The gang drinks too much, become edgy, then rush out into the storm as if confronting the mythic "giant" figure in the dark. Charlotte is left alone with Joe, or a vision of Joe, appearing in the shadows. She struggles to decipher reality.
"I can't tell whether I remember it or whether I was dreaming."
"What's the difference?"
In Joe's final appearance he is badly beaten and bloody. His guitar mysteriously appears, linking back to a scene where his house is empty and his smashed car abandoned by a field of tall grass. There is a preceding scene which shows a candle lit vigil for a string of murder victims and Charlotte's father apologises to her for ignoring her before explaining that Daphne's boyfriend (Brady) has confessed to stabbing her 44 times while high, linking back to an early scene where Charlotte notices the couple together with their car covered in blood. Her father expresses despair at the pointlessness of the killing.
The ending, chasing after Olivia into the fields to be met by the shadow of the giant, implies that most of what we have previously witnessed is a sort of memory-dream fusion where Charlotte is stuck in a state of purgatory with various victims including her friends Daphne, Joe and Olivia. She comes to accept her exit from home, whether it is literal or into some kind of dream of death.
The giant, rather than a specific person, seems to be a grim reaper figure that looms over the town inspiring deranged acts of violence or nightmares. Various traumas merge into one dark landscape. Due to her unreliable and confused narration of the story, it is not clear what has actually happened to Charlotte, but if (similar to films like 'The Lovely Bones') she turned out to be the ghost of a murdered girl looking back on her life as it fades away, this would make sense. The unexplained aspect of the plot is probably there in order to encourage audiences to empathise directly with Charlotte and not attempt to rationalise her experience of a dark dream.