I Kill Giants (2017)

Adapted from the graphic novel by Joe Kelly and Ken Niimura, I Kill Giants follows Barbara Thorson, a teenager who builds traps in the woods, carries a hammer she calls Coveleski, and insists that giants are coming. The giants, of course, are her mother's cancer. Anders Walter directs the whole thing with a straight face and a muted palette, and Madison Wolfe carries it well enough that the eventual collapse of the fantasy lands with some weight. It is a grief story wearing a monster-movie coat, and it never quite apologizes for the costume.

On the matter of contemporary social consciousness, the film is largely quiet. The supporting cast is more diverse than the average small-budget fantasy, with Zoe Saldana as the school psychologist and Noel Clarke as her husband, though the film never remarks on it and never frames it as a mission. Barbara is a stubborn, angry girl surrounded by women who try to reach her, her sister, her psychologist, her friend Sophia, but this is a portrait of adolescent rage and mourning, not a statement about anything larger. Race goes unmentioned. There is no romantic subplot of any kind, no environmental hand-wringing, no critique of wealth, no interest in bodies or how they are judged.

Barbara's elaborate inner world and her refusal of ordinary social contact can be read as neurodivergent coding, and some viewers will read it that way, but the film itself is unambiguous: this is grief, not neurology. The climax, in which a dying giant explains that every living thing must end and that joy is the only answer, arrives as a lesson. It is delivered gently, folded into the fantasy, but it is a lesson nonetheless, and the film wants us to take it home. A modest, sincere picture, then. It earns its tears honestly and asks for very little else.