‘The Burning Giants’ Review: An Arcane, Multi-Pronged Mystery About Ethnic Cleansing in Thailand

If it’s a bit too easy to group Thai director Phuttiphong Aroonpheng into a post-Apichatpong Weerasethakul wave of cryptic fablemakers, his latest only strengthens this association. His third feature “The Burning Giants” is a woozy dystopian mystery, with fog-strewn forests and liquidy purple skies captured by cinematographer Emo Weemhoff in a menacing ayahuasca haze, and the breadcrumbs of a story about the violent ousting of an indigenous people from their ancestral home, scattered widely enough to ensure you’ll get lost in the woods.

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This kind of disorientation isn’t without potency or pleasure, and for a tale of displacement, it’s a fittingly hazy mood. But Aroonpheng’s worldbuilding is arcane to a fault, with no thanks to a weirdly flat rhythm that dulls the excitement of the film’s many narrative swerves. Competing in Venice’s Orizzonti sidebar, it’s a bit of a letdown considering the promise of “Manta Ray,” Aroonpheng’s waterlogged ghost tale, which won the section when it bowed there in 2018. 

Still, there’s much to admire in a film that’s so defiantly elliptical, and that doesn’t care to hand-hold the non-Thai viewer through its maze. In any case, knowing a little bit about the true-life episode that inspired its fantastical reimagining will certainly help viewers connect with its cryptic choices. The idea for Aroonpheng’s script originated with news of the 2014 murder of Indigenous rights activist Porlajee “Billy” Rakchongcharoen, a member of the mountain-dwelling Karen ethnic group whose language and people are prominent throughout the film. Rakchongcharoen was the spokesperson for a community of Karen folks living in the mountains of west Thailand when they were forcibly evicted by Thai authorities. Arson was reportedly among the cruel methods of dispersal, though the officers’ crimes were denied and ignored by the State.

In the beginning of “The Burning Giants,” a presumed-infected man named Yak (Awat Ratanapintha) scurries through a purgatorial hillside before being captured and detained by armed mountain police wearing gas masks. There’s a mysterious sickness going around, apparently caused by a toxic fog that invisibly burns the skin of whoever comes into contact with it. The indigenous man has some mild skin discoloration but it’s nothing like what’s happened to one of the cops’ own, whose raw, bubbling blisters are seen in agonizing close-up as he writhes in his cot back at the squad’s eerily vacant outpost.

There are intimations of a state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing, especially when the soldiers set the man’s cottage aflame. But right before you think you’ve got a grip on what’s happening, Aroonpheng throws us out of this totalitarian thriller and into the seat of a motorbike romance involving one of the more clueless cops from earlier, Lak (Pakapol Srirongmuang), and his sweetheart Aepoh (Phunthida Phairuangkij).

That’s the first of several remaining hard pivots that reveal Aepoh — and later, her Karen kinswoman Aeva (Waywiree Ittianunkul) — as uprooted victims of the authorities’ clearings. In restrained, naturalistic vignettes, Aepoh mans a market stand and tentatively succumbs to Lak’s overtures; meanwhile, Aeva works as a nanny for a bougie middle-class family while leaving her own young daughter at a makeshift daycare in her own humble part of town. These snapshots into the afterlives of dislocated women and the wary nature of their assimilation into urban society could use far more room to breathe. But onwards the film goes, winding back up the mountain where Aeva searches for Yak and says goodbye to her now-decimated village through a series of long, mournful takes. 

And as Aroonpheng spins his narrative into a long, misshapen web, the drama involving Yak vanishes behind a cloud of fog and transforms into the film’s most baffling yet bracing detour. The mystic whine of Christine Ott and Mathieu Gabry’s score carries us into a hidden world of ancient Thai deities living inside the mountain’s caves and tunnels. Bedazzled warriors cast in golden, soft-edged lighting glide around sultrily, until a tusked ogre slips away from his masters and (once more) we descend back to civilization. If the first round of assimilation escaped you, well, now we get it again in a more painful, supernatural register. It’s odd for a film that takes so many ambitious shots to keep making the same points; some fog-clearing, in this case, might have clarified the details.