Written and directed by David Raboy
Starring Odessa Young, Ben Schnetzer, Jack Kilmer and Madelyn Cline
Running time: 1 hour and 39 minutes
MPAA Rating: Not Rated

by Audrey Callerstrom

There’s something here. The Giant, written and directed by David Raboy, is based on his short film of the same name.  I wish I could find the short film, because I think that Raboy is a competent director from a technical and aesthetic standpoint. Maybe it’s better as a short film. It shows the promise of something bigger, something deeper. But Raboy can’t decide if he wants to do a coming-of-age film about Georgia teens after graduation, one that moves similarly to The Tree of Life, or if this is a horror film with a vague supernatural presence. It doesn’t balance both. There’s plenty of voiceover, interior shots of homes (big plantation-style ones), characters speaking poetically. The Giant is like a fever dream of a cohesive, longer film that spends more time with each scene, diving into some of the themes and elements the final product only alludes to.

There are a lot of things this film does well. Early scenes are haunting. A figure moves through a large home, chirps of her daughter are nearby. Next we see the figure’s dangling feet outside – the woman has hung herself from a tree. Some years later, we meet the daughter, the teenage Charlotte (Australian actress Odessa Young, Assassination Nation), who has just graduated high school. Charlotte silently copes with the death of her mother as well as the recent, mysterious disappearance of her boyfriend, Joe (Ben Schnetzer). This film seems to have a permanent dark tone, which made it challenging to watch on a small screen. Most scenes take place in the evening, lit only by the moon, or headlights, or the interior of a car. When you can’t see anything, you don’t know where to look. None of the light fixtures within Charlotte’s home appear to work. When she comes home late at night, her father, a cop named Rex (P.J. Marshall) is sitting at the dining room table, shrouded in darkness. Rex is troubled by mysterious deaths of young women Charlotte’s age happening in their town. Is it a serial killer, is it Joe, who suddenly reappears troubled and without explanation, or is there “something out there”?

As soon as a scene gets interesting, or appears to reveal something that connects it to the rest of the film, it ends abruptly. It doesn’t like to stay in one scene for too long before jumping to – the next day? Weeks from now? A flashback? It’s confusing and frustrating to watch. But it looks good. I like how Raboy works with sound and light to immerse the viewer in these hot, Southern summer evenings. Everyone looks sweaty, surfaces look dusty, the sound of cicadas buzzes like an eternal dial tone. In voiceover, Charlotte talks about A Nightmare Before Christmas, and people use landline phones, but otherwise the time period is vague. I don’t know if this is deliberate or coincidental.  Charlotte is underwritten, but Young keeps us intrigued. She keeps the character sympathetic and grounded even when the script kind of limps around her. For a better film that showcases her talents, Shirley, which came out earlier this year, is available on Hulu and is holding a place on my top films of the year so far.

Suspense builds toward the end, but it never delivers. If Raboy wanted to make a mystery/thriller, all the elements are there, and the performers are capable. He just needs to spend more than five minutes in a scene and build out the script. He jumps, skips, plays with voiceover again and again. If he wanted to make something about the supernatural force behind the film’s title, then, we need to see something. 10 Cloverfield Lane did this well, building tension and suspense between three performers before showing the creature in the film’s final moments. The supporting players here are interchangeable and forgettable. The Giant might be considered noir, too, or noir-light with its energy, the mystery, poetic lines like “all this heat, all this pain.” For Raboy’s next film, I hope that he sticks to a cohesive theme, builds out the story and spends more time letting each scene breathe. 

Available to watch on demand today.