Venice Review: The Burning Giants Forsakes Its Mysteries to Spin a Repetitive Yarn

Buried deep under the jungle in western Thailand where Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s The Burning Giants takes place is an empty theatre. Rows of velvety seats are coated in dust while a thick white smoke floats above them, like a massive ghost itching to break free. No sooner do the air vents switch back to life that the fog is sucked out of the hall and puffed into the rainforest above, through an intricate lattice of pipes that candies the hills with white clouds. It’s a strangely soothing view, and Aroonpheng, a painter and cinematographer by training, returns to it throughout his second feature, framing those vaporous formations like spirits gently rising above the trees. But the smoke carries death. Those who inhale it contract a highly contagious disease that leaves bodies covered in burns inflicted by an invisible fire. So it was for Yak (Awat Ratanapintha), a young man who refused to abandon his village when authorities began to forcibly relocate the ethnic minorities still living in the poisonous jungle. Captured by cops patrolling the forest with gas masks, he’s sent to a facility sinisterly redolent of a detention center, not quarantined but imprisoned. Thus begins a growingly surreal tale inspired by a real-life tragedy.

On August 10 this year, mere days after the Venice Film Festival announced The Burning Giants would screen in the Orizzonti sidebar, Thai authorities raided the Karen community residing in the Kaeng Krachan National Park, arresting 26 villagers—children and pregnant women among them—to prosecute them on immigration charges and deport them to Myanmar, where the ruling military junta has decimated vulnerable groups like them since it took power in 2021. Not once does Aroonpheng identify Yak as Karen, the mountain tribespeople sandwiched between Thailand and Myanmar. But he’s said the film, conceived in the middle of the COVID pandemic, was inspired by Porlajee “Billy” Rakchongcharoen, a Karen activist who disappeared in mysterious circumstances in 2014 after a long battle against police forces evicting villagers from the Kaeng Krachan district to make room for the new national park. 

Aroonpheng’s debut feature, Manta Ray—which earned him the Orizzonti’s top prize in 2018—was similarly concerned with the plight of Thailand’s ethnic minorities. Dedicated to the Rohingyas, a stateless people who’ve been fleeing persecution in Myanmar only to confront more abuse in Thailand, it followed a refugee who was rescued by a Thai fisherman and slowly started mirroring his savior. It’d be tempting to read the two films as a diptych. Like its predecessor, The Burning Giants kicks off as a two-hander, splintering its focus between Yak and Lak (Pakapol Srirongmuang), the only Thai officer willing to treat the prisoner with a modicum of dignity. That’s until a senseless tragedy causes the film to switch registers and become something far more elusive still. As Aroonpheng ships us back into the theater from the preamble, The Burning Giant stages a riff on the ancient Sanskrit poem Ramayana: suddenly, out of the fog and cavernous tunnels emerge deities clad in gold, and with Yak and Lak out of the picture, the director starts tracking another outcast, a tusked ogre who flees the fantastical locale to enter the “real” world again.

No point harping on the distinction between fact and myth, though. Like Manta Ray, The Burning Giants exists in a vaporous region, one foot planted in a universe governed by systemic racism, class frictions, and military checkpoints, the other dangling in a milieu that’s a lot harder to define. Long before Aroonpheng sidelines the present-day storyline to embrace fantasy, his film blurs the line between dreams and waking life. But their amalgam this time proves far less entrancing. Visually, The Burning Giants isn’t a patch on its forebear, which began with the curious sight of a soldier roaming the rainforest draped in Christmas lights, the first in a long series of images equal-parts unsettling and mesmerizing. Shot by Emo Weemhoff, Aroonpheng’s latest doesn’t stint on bizarre flourishes, but it’s far less interested in luxuriating in all its mysteries than peddling some growingly rote messages around the costs of forced assimilation. Tusks aside, there’s precious little difference between Yak and the ogre, two pariahs uprooted from their native turfs and struggling to survive in worlds stacked against them. Which is another way of saying that, wildly distinct backdrops notwithstanding, the film’s two parts are dramatically identical, and in spinning the same story twice, The Burning Giants winds up feeling repetitive. 

Aroonpheng’s script traffics in some heavy-handed symbolism. Whether because he doesn’t speak much Thai or simply refuses to converse with his captors out of pride, Yak has barely a line of dialogue, and there’s something a little on-the-nose in how The Burning Giants insists on treating him as a voiceless “Other.” In retrospect, even the central conceit rings contrived. A theatre contaminating the outside world with seemingly toxic substances is a rich, controversial idea, but Aroonpheng doesn’t mine it as thoroughly as he might have, settling instead for something much less ambiguous while writing off the smoke as an excuse for some State-sanctioned ethnic cleansing. The result is a film that’s only faintly connected to its antecedent. Where Manta Ray looked routinely in thrall to its images—and, at its best, could make that wonder infectious—The Burning Giants seems much more beholden to its narrative, forsaking mysteries to spin an oddly inert parable. 

The Burning Giants premiered at the 2026 Venice Film Festival.