The Burning Giants (2026) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: for smoke
Take a Drink: whenever someone finds it hard to breathe
Take a Drink: for invisible flame
Take a Drink: for chants, songs, and humming
Do a Shot: “requesting permission to perform the task”
By: Henry J. Fromage (Two Beers) –
While Apichatpong Weerasethakul established Thailand’s arthouse bona fides more than 20 years ago beginning with his Tropical Maladies, in the last few years it feels like no major film festival has passed without a major Thai work at least playing a sidebar.
The Burning Giants is set in and around a forested mountain where mysterious smoke carries illness. When a member of the local Keren ethnic group is found surviving out there somehow and captured by the military forces that try to keep people out, a chain of violence is initiated.
A Toast
The Burning Giants drops you right into a forbidden zone, where smoke is said to spread disease and nobody is supposed to live. When the Keren “mountain person” is captured by a paramilitary group, he’s seemingly not susceptible to the breathing problems that strike some of the patrol despite wearing masks, but is covered by mysterious patchwork burn scars- apparently another symptom of whatever is afflicting people up here.
This is a slow burn kind of plot, one built on atmosphere and the characters’ own unsure navigation of it, but it does feature some pretty solidly horrifying body horror- pustules and raw burn wounds aplenty- before it takes a tragic turn when the military does what the military is going to do, and the man’s wife, who happens to be the sister of one of the more morally conflicted guards of the area, comes looking for him, with only more tragedy to follow.
The film makes one hell of a shift in the last quarter, though, perhaps even a Brechtian one. I won’t reveal what classic work suddenly jumps to the fore, or in what way, except to say that it unexpectedly ties in with the very first seemingly ill-fitting minute or two. I’d be fascinated to hear your opinion on how that then ties in with the main plot, though.
Director Phuttiphong Aroonpheng started out as a Cinematographer, and it’s obvious in his meticulously composed frames and camera movement here. The worlds he constructs draw your eye and draw you into their mysteries.
Beer Two
Good luck sussing out the plot even on your best attention. This is the kind of film you let wash over you and build out your theories of how it all fits together as you go, paying especial attention to the few places plot and imagery rhyme.
Verdict
The Burning Giants is a beautiful exploration of the mysterious liminal spaces between Thai reality and myth, and how they intertwine.
