A mysterious smoke hangs over the forests of western Thailand in Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s The Burning Giants. As it spreads, so do disease, destruction and displacement, in a devastating film that gradually takes on an intriguing, mythical quality.

The film carries a profound real-world weight, drawing inspiration from the murder of an Indigenous Karen rights activist fighting state forestry departments. Yet, Aroonpheng chooses to filter this unsettling piece of Thai politics through the lens of a slow-burning, dystopian fable.

The plot, like the lives of its characters, is fractured. We follow three main figures: a Karen villager who is arrested and taken into quarantine; a park ranger increasingly distrustful of his colleagues and their actions; and a nanny in the city, the villager’s wife, who is drawn back towards the forest.

Their stories slowly come together, only for the film to dissolve them away, returning to its opening image: a hidden theatre in the forest from which the smoke emerges. From there, The Burning Giants surrenders to something stranger: a staged performance of traumas which reveals that these cycles of control and suffering are not historical anomalies, but deeply ingrained patterns that have persisted for generations. The film itself becomes part of that cycle: we watch in quiet horror, only to find ourselves back where we started.

The most powerful moments of the film come in the nanny’s journey into the forest. The cramped, shadowy interiors of the city give way to hazy, dreamlike expanses of forest, where she encounters abandoned Indigenous homes. In one particularly affecting scene, she sings in an empty house, calling for a spirit to “return to the forest”. Her song echoes the dance and song performed earlier by her husband while he is chained to a bed, both expressing a painful yearning for home. Enhanced by a minimalist, deeply atmospheric sound design, these dual laments become a powerful elegy for the displaced Karen people.

The Burning Giants’ challenging structure may test the patience of those seeking a clearer, traditional narrative resolution. But, it remains enchanting and heartbreaking – haunted by abuses of power and the loss of a world that once felt sacred.