Mary Fletcher
This film is about Barbara, a young secondary school attender, constructing an elaborate fantasy that helps her deal with an unbearable situation. We see people trying to help her and some girls being nasty to her in the general odious ways of school bullies.
I would have liked to have seen the narrative without having absorbed the inevitable clues picked up from the publicity. The ending could not be entirely a surprise although not completely obvious.
Also, the plot requires no one in the film mentioning facts in the school, which I would think is impossible.
The acting is fine, the special effects impressively Gothic. The details are imaginatively peculiar and the brooding landscape is dramatic. One scene moved me to tears, and then I felt the ending was unrealistic – the director’s own escape.
It’s an interesting foray into using imagery to convey emotions – film being so suited to indicating visions and craziness but so rarely used for this. I call it a brave attempt to tackle how the mind can invent in order to protect a person from unbearable pain. Maybe that’s why we have religion persisting in a scientific era. Barbara makes her own mythology.
I Kill Giants, a film directed by Anders Walter (2018). Madison Wolfe, Zoe Saldana, Imogen Poots and Sydney Wade are actresses featured.
Volume 35 no 2 November / December 2020