the giant movie review

Early in the picture, Olivia, the best friend of the central character, Charlotte, is about to jump in a lake, or large pond. The two have just graduated from high school in a semi-rural southern town, and they’re goofing off with some male pals. Contemplating the water and the latening hour, Olivia says, “It’s been a while since I been swimming in the dark. Who knows what nasty things are in there.”

Here and in many more moments, “The Giant,” written, directed, and edited by David Raboy , and adapted from his 2012 short of the same name, catches itself on a hook of mystery and dread that leaves a mark. And in many other moments, the movie hits snags that speak to its larger ambitions, ambitions the filmmaker can’t quite realize.

Prior to the swim, Charlotte ( Odessa Young ) is caught in a dream that’s also a memory, of her mother’s suicide a year before. At the swimming site their guy pals tease them—one actually threatens Charlotte with a lit firework to convince her to get in the water—and what seems like sophomoric hijinks carries real menace with it. Later on in the sweaty night there’s word of a young woman’s murder in a nearby town. Still later there’s word of the murder of a girl Charlotte just saw at a diner.

To make matters weirder, suddenly Charlotte’s former boyfriend, Joe ( Ben Schnetzer ) turns up. He has not been around since Charlotte’s mother’s suicide. And he’s got some things to say. After Charlotte tells him “You’re back from the dead,” he asks her if she has, of late, heard a thumping sound, one familiar to them both from the bad time. “That was the most painful week of my life,” Charlotte says, in protest. “I heard them last night,” Joe says. They’re driving around now in Joe’s pickup, enveloped in darkness. “That giant,” he continues.

The movie is suffused with enigmatic touches like this, but Raboy, as he increasingly uses voiceover in a way that’s very much Malick, can lose hold of the distinction between mystery and affectation. When Joe speaks of enduring “all this heat, all this sweat, all this pain, until we melt together again,” I was suddenly reminded of the old Monty Python sketch in which Terry Gilliam ’s military lawyer stands and exclaims, “Sorry but my client has become pretentious!”

And the film’s temporal distortions and off-ramps at first seem to dilute and diffuse the movie’s serial-killer storyline, until one realizes that it’s actually just disguising the fact that the storyline doesn’t have much there there to begin with. Rex (P.J. Marshall) as Charlotte’s father, an officer of the law who mainly sits in shadows and mopes, is ineffectual on purpose, I suppose, but his inertia is so overstated it’s almost funny, and not in a good way.

Nevertheless, Raboy manages to pull off several galvanic cinematic effects even as his scenario yields little more than exasperation. There’s enough raw talent on display here that I’m looking forward to his next picture nevertheless.

Glenn Kenny

Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

• Odessa Young as Charlotte
• Ben Schnetzer as Joe
• Jack Kilmer as Will
• Madelyn Cline as Olivia
• Danny Ramirez as Brady
• P.J. Marshall as Rex
• Ari Balouzian
• David Raboy

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The Giant Reviews

Exploring memory, grief, and the trauma of growing up, the film turns the fear of adulthood into a monster that lurks in the storm clouds gathering on the horizon.

Full Review | Oct 17, 2022

As we volley between the twins of memory and sleep, The Giant really confirms nothing but a feeling of ennui and spiritual unrest.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Nov 17, 2020

The Giant is undeniably pretty and achieves a certain eeriness. However, the film's unwillingness to provide traditional answers is likely to leave a lot of viewers unsatisfied.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Nov 16, 2020

The Giant exudes the essence of a surreal noir, visually arresting and more of a study or abstract of the dread that comes from a slasher film.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 15, 2020

Try as I might, I can't quite shake nor stop thinking about The Giant, and that makes me believe Raboy's done something very, very right, here - even if you might have to squint a bit to see it.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Nov 14, 2020

Despite some visual flourishes, it's muddled and tedious.

Full Review | Nov 14, 2020

Raboy manages to pull off several galvanic cinematic effects even as his scenario yields little more than exasperation.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 13, 2020

The movie though fairly well acted is too confusing plot wise to be entertaining. Plus the =characters are murky.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/10 | Nov 10, 2020

It's audacious, affected filmmaking, something like a soap opera stripped of all winks and nods and distilled down to only its dark grime.

Full Review | Jul 30, 2020

Graduating high school is supposed to be a celebration, but The Giant certainly isn't any fun.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Jun 19, 2020

A terrifying emotional puzzle. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Oct 1, 2019

Rather than take what we see at face value, those able to let The Giant wash over them will witness pieces of themselves instead.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Sep 12, 2019

Well-directed but hollow and tiresome.

Full Review | Sep 8, 2019

Raboy gives us so little to hang onto - be it an arresting image, a palpable touch of the uncanny, or a moment of real tension - that it gets harder and harder to want to follow him.

• Cast & crew

User reviews

Misleading Title

• May 30, 2021

Save your money or go in with low expectations

• jasontrabish
• Nov 14, 2020

great DoP, thanx, that's all.

• Jan 4, 2022

Incoherent mess

• Dec 23, 2020

Colossal waste of time!

• Nov 17, 2020

Mournful music comes to a crescendo while a young woman makes mournful noises

• savindwales
• Dec 2, 2020

Without A Doubt The Worst Movie I've Ever Seen

• oz_13_was_taken
• Nov 18, 2020
• rotini-52586
• Nov 15, 2020

Legitimately the worst movie EVER

• Nov 23, 2020

Not your average thriller

• Dec 1, 2020

Aww Jeez, REALLY???

• elrushbo-72646
• Jan 28, 2021

Skillfully made. Not for everyone.

• Maxi_Miller_82
• Sep 2, 2021

Ballad of a small town girl

• Apr 16, 2021

If I could give it zero, I would.

• therealjaysmoke
• May 19, 2021

Might be the most boring movie ever made...

• realityinmind
• Dec 15, 2020

So many movies out there...

• mikey-47119
• Jun 13, 2021

...because zero stars was not an option....

• shjones-17415
• Jan 9, 2023
• foxfirehounds
• Aug 4, 2024

It's unique!

• andretingtang
• Apr 20, 2021

Umm... what?

• MissEFierro
• Oct 8, 2023

Very unusual enjoyable film

Don't bother watching.

• tonda-01402
• Sep 19, 2024
• Mar 11, 2024

The hottest garbage that I have ever not seen

• bigtastyespinoza
• Nov 13, 2020

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‘The Giant’ Review

David Raboy's debut has style to spare, but holds the viewer at a frustrating distance.

By Andrew Barker

Andrew Barker

Senior Features Writer

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First-time feature director-writer-editor David Raboy certainly knows how to conjure up an atmosphere. Expanding his own short of the same title, Raboy’s elliptical psychological thriller “ The Giant ” gives us the story of a small Southern town beset by a killing spree, yet his real interest is in the constant changes in barometric pressure: the heaviness of the sticky, buggy Georgia air; the gathering storm that builds and builds just over the horizon for the entirety of the film. But he lays the atmosphere on so think that it threatens to suffocate everything within, and the film holds its audience at such a remove that eventually you stop trying to connect.

Containing little in the way of linear plot, “The Giant” is always willing to leave its viewers in the dark, often quite literally: much of the film (shot on 35 mm by Eric Yue) takes place in grainy darkness, and Raboy is just as likely to fill frames with smears of light and blurry figures crowding the foreground as he is with clearly defined images. Dialogue follows suit, with characters spitting out fragments of cryptic, unfinished thoughts and half-remembered reveries in low whispers. In small doses, his filmmaking style exudes confidence, and there’s something intriguing about the teasing way he leads us around the furthest edges of his story. But Raboy gives us so little to hang onto – be it an arresting image, a palpable touch of the uncanny, or a moment of real tension – that it gets harder and harder to want to follow him.

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Charlotte (Odessa Young) is a 17-year-old spending one last sweltering summer in her hometown before heading off to college. Charlotte’s mother recently committed suicide, and the death hangs heavy over her as she tries to enjoy some quality time with best friend Olivia (Madelyn Cline) and the local boys hanging around the unnamed town’s run-down diners and lakes.

Popular on Variety

The story kicks into gear when Charlotte’s mysterious boyfriend Joe (Ben Schnetzer) returns to town after an unexplained absence, and his nocturnal appearances in Charlotte’s life start to draw her away from her other friends. Again and again, the two drive in circles through winding country roads, talk in circles about their own dimly articulated past, and tend to have passing encounters with young women, some of whom bearing a resemblance to Charlotte, who will later turn up murdered.

This spate of killings is, strangely, largely a background issue for the film, with all of the violence occurring safely offscreen. And even when the body count rises so high that the city imposes a curfew, the focus remains solely on Charlotte and her steady disconnection from reality. Is Charlotte in danger? Is Joe the killer? Is Charlotte? Is any of this really happening? Raboy isn’t interested in providing many direct answers, and even as the film builds to a climactic end-of-summer party, it drifts further into dreamlike abstraction.

Appearing in every scene, Young certainly manages to command the screen, though she isn’t given too many different notes to hit, with her performance confined to a narrow range of ambiguously haunted disorientation. As Olivia, Cline is responsible for providing virtually all of “The Giant’s” scant bursts of liveliness, humor and spontaneity, and the film’s pulse quickens with almost every scene she’s in. Hardly anyone else has the chance to make much of an impression.

Raboy certainly has style to spare, and as much as a viewer might be frustrated by some of his choices, there’s always a clear intention behind them. One just hopes his next film will let us in on what those intentions are.

Reviewed at UTA screening room, Los Angeles, August 22, 2019. (In Toronto Film Festival - Discovery)

• Production: A Camera Ready Pictures presentation of a Bogie Films, Vixens, Extra A production. Produced by Dennis Masel, Daniel Dewes, Rachael Fung, Gary Farkas, Clement Lepoutre, Olivier Muller.
• Crew: Directed, written, edited by David Raboy. Camera (color): Eric Yue. Music: Ari Balouzian.
• With: Odessa Young, Ben Schnetzer, Jack Kilmer, Madelyn Cline, Danny Ramirez, PJ Marshall

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