There should be a separate genre heading for this film: time-wasting droopy fantasy. It is based on a graphic novel by Joe Kelly and Ken Niimura and directed by the Danish film-maker Anders Walter, who won an Oscar in 2014 for his short film Helium. From the outset, there is a heart-sinking sense of deja vu. JA Bayona’s recent movie A Monster Calls – about a child retreating from emotional pain into CGI fantasy – had a certain storytelling force. But this awfully similar confection is flaccid: a pointless parade of unearned emotion, unearned drama, unearned everything.
Madison Wolfe plays Barbara, a lonely and troubled girl who regularly roams through the nearby forest hunting for “giants”, which we periodically get to see – sub-Iron-Giant/dementors. But there is no question of us, the audience, finding them scary or dramatic in the sense that Barbara does, because naturally we understand immediately that they are delusional fantasies, part of Barbara’s troubled way of life that has got her bullied at school for being a weirdo. Her elder sister, Karen (Imogen Poots), fixes her meals at night. Zoe Saldana plays her superciliously sorrowing school counsellor, Mrs Mollé.
So what is the cause of Barbara’s “giants”? It turns out to be extremely straightforward. There is no good reason for everyone not to be talking openly about it all the time. But this explanation is coyly withheld from us through a dishonest narrative fudge until the virtually the last moment, creating fake mystery and fake jeopardy. Of minuscule interest.
