The movie takes wildly unexpected turns, but all of these are in service of an extensive dramatic exploration of the ways in which religion, political demonization and economic exploitation become intrinsically linked. Courtesy Lucky Number

Disguised by straightforward drama, Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s Yak Mai (The Burning Giants) reveals staggering abstractions, which lure you deeper into its political labyrinth. The Thai filmmaker draws on myth and cultural identity to spin a languid tale of mountainous smoke causing mysterious burns, and the ethnic minority subsequently made a scapegoat. Its echoes of the COVID-19 pandemic are overt, but Aroonpheng’s aim reaches wider and deeper, yielding audiovisual poetry that speaks to contemporary national moods, and to the repetitions of history.

Through a prologue presented out of time, an empty theatre space collects a nebulous mist, which it sends spiraling upward through its vents, and into Thailand’s western forests outside Bangkok. While the film eventually returns to this imagined site, in its closing salvo, it gives way to a tale of tyrannical oppression, as a villager with discolored cheeks (Awat Ratanapintha) is chased down by armed and masked Thai police in the mountains. They strip him of his shirt to reveal what looks like vitiligo, but which they refer to as “burns”—an apparent sign of a recent infection spreading through the area—so they take him into custody, though not before torching his home.

Along the way, the KN95 of their chief, Sompong (Teerawat Mulvilai), comes loose, exposing him to the nearby smoke and gradually covering his torso in actual burn marks. Over several days, these scars release magical flames—a kind of searing in reverse—until the unnamed disease proves fatal. Whether caused by the mist or some unseen germ, whatever harm lurks in the forest appears to be real, though its effects also clarify that the unnamed villager isn’t really at fault, obfuscating the real reasons for his arrest.

The subsequent narrative is fractured in purposeful ways, a chain that connects one character to the next without fully detailing the wider picture just yet. The police have been instructed to clear the mountain forests. One of them, the conscientious Lak (Pakapol Srirongmuang), wrestles with his convictions as he oversees the imprisoned villager, who languishes in handcuffs while being told he’s under medical observation. Lak, who makes his way to a local market to spend time with his girlfriend Aepoh (Phunthida Phairuangkij), reveals to her the presence of one of the “mountain people” who refused to evacuate, which she relays to her sister Aeva (Waywiree Ittianunkul), a nanny in Bangkok.

Aeva, it turns out, left one of these mountain villages as well, along with her adolescent daughter, but left her husband Muso behind—who she now suspects is the man in custody. Slowly, and through focused interpersonal drama, the pieces on this chessboard re-align so that Aeva can make her way to the incarcerated villager, in the hopes that he’s her lost love. However, the powers of the state have other plans, which play out by dead of night, but which the police boast about openly and maliciously, leaving little room for justice or catharsis.

The movie’s careful unspooling involves characters like Lak being deputized to burn villages and kidnap dissenters—or worse. For his story, Aroonpheng appears to draw from real forest clearings to make way for national parks, and the forced disappearance of activists like Porlajee “Billy” Rakchongcharoen, belonging to the Karen ethnic minority. With this sordid reality at the back of his mind, the director behind Manta Ray (a haunting film about a Rohingya migrant) trains his lens on the mountain’s atmosphere, as a living space that seems to make a choice about who to harm or protect.

More than its abstract locations, Aroonpheng uses his actors to unveil both mood and morality in unexpected ways. As with Manta Ray, the sound design of The Burning Giants goes a long way to creating a hypnotic atmosphere—not just by way of music, or enigmatic rumbles, but a guttural suffering, as the villager languishes in captivity, writhing and contorting in ways that appear to resemble a classical dance (a specific one that becomes relevant later on).

However, while these visceral flourishes help detail the story at hand—one which crescendos quietly, through a rumination on the lives left behind in a mountainous village—Aroonpheng deepens the movie’s political exploration in jaw-dropping ways, in the final act. Although the movie’s denouement seems disconnected from the rest of its plot, by way of a pivot toward a seemingly unconnected stage performance of the Ramakien (a re-enactment of the Hindu epic the Ramayana), this coda serves to illuminate the national mythologies justifying fascistic violence in the first place.

Like the Ramayana—often fodder for Hindu nationalism in India—the Ramakien fuels Thai identity through its tale of the benevolent prince Rama rescuing his wife Sita from the clutches of the demon Ravana (the plot of the missing husband seems inspired by this too). In both countries’ tellings, a key chapter involves the burning of Ravana’s kingdom of Lanka, which, in The Burning Giants, forms the basis of a harrowing narrative reversal that explores what it means for vengeful flame to exist at the center of national myth—in turn harkening back to the movie’s fascistic forest clearings. The movie’s quietly harrowing closing act takes wildly unexpected turns, but all of these are in service of an extensive dramatic exploration of the ways in which religion, political demonization and economic exploitation become intrinsically linked.

Rather than sermonizing, Aroonpheng dramatizes and aestheticizes, creating winding mysteries in plain sight, en route to a deeply moving final act. The Burning Giants bides its time through its ethereal magnetism, born of careful framing, gradual movements and vivid landscapes awash in shadow, creating a sense of danger at every turn. This danger isn’t just one of armed political overreach, but of entire worlds and systems bent to the will of the powerful. The movie combats this not through hollow victories, but through the loaded fantasia of a woodland realm where everything is heightened, and defeat feels utterly, intimately personal, as the mechanics of authoritarianism are stripped down to their DNA. At the end of it all, it’s a base ingredient we might just recognize in ourselves.

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