“Easy enough to follow until it becomes like punching through fog.”

A dark, empty theatre filled with a mysterious fog. A figure comes into frame, mostly obscured from view, and throws a lever. The other hand holds a lomphok, a ceremonial Thai headgear. The lever operates a ceiling fan, which sucks the fog through an exhaust fan and an eleborate set of rusty pipes, to be spilled into a mountain forest miles away.

A group of soldiers on patrol encounter a man covered in burn marks in a mountain forest and arrest him. They wear face masks, and there is clearly some fear of him. Is he contagious? They take the man, whose name we will later learn is Muso (Awat Ratanapintha), to a compound, but not before burning his hut. The forest, it turns out, is a quarantined zone where a mysterious fog infects people, causing them to be burned by an invisible fire. One of the soldiers, Lak (Pakapol Srirongmuang), returns to the city after his workday, and meets his girlfriend Aepoh on the market. When he tells her the story of the man they apprehended, she immediately calls her sister Aeva (Waywiree Ittianunkul), whose husband is still missing after the evacuation of the mountain. Aeva and her daughter drop everything and come over. When she visits the compound the next day she is told her husband isn’t there, although the viewer knows his terrible fate. Desperate and firmly believing that Muso has returned to their village she starts the ascent up the mountain. Lak, knowing what truly befell Muso, feels remorse and follows her to get her safely back. When a strange figure unexpectedly comes out of the dense fog hanging in the forest, he instinctively fires his gun.

It is here that The Burning Giants, the third feature film by Thai director Phuttiphong Aroonpheng, takes a hard left. The film turns into a mythological tale that loosely tells the story of the Ramakien, one of Thailand’s national epics, performed by Khon (a traditional dance performance) dancers in ceremonial garb in the theatre we saw in the opening. Aroonpheng weaves into his version of the Ramakien, a tale of good and evil chronicling the abduction of a woman and her eventual liberation by her hero and lover, elements of the folk tale Sang Thong, in which an ogre (Thanatwut Rodpai) features prominently. Aroonpheng takes the ogre, Thulee, out of the theatre and the cave, and eventually out of the forest to live in the city in poverty and shame.

It is a befuddling ending to a film that for two-thirds of its runtime was fairly grounded and had a streak of social criticism running through it. The mystery of the person who releases the toxic fog hangs over the film, but it is notable that Muso, his wife Aeva, and her sister are all Karen, an ethnic group living in refugee camps along Thailand’s border with Myanmar after having fled violence and persecution in that country. Their refugee status means they are looked down upon by certain segments of Thai society. In a story that initially seems like a riff on the COVID crisis, the fact that all characters that lived in the mountains are Karen is meant to show that the way Muso is treated (and to some extent his wife, working as a nanny in Bangkok) is a reflection of the prejudice against these people. The toxic fog in a way IS that prejudiced part of Thai society.

Which makes the inclusion of the Ramakien all the more puzzling. The relationship to what came before is tenuous at best, although the subtleties might escape a non-Thai audience. The segment is intriguing, for sure, but it is as if the projectionist mixed up some reels and inadvertently showed the final act of another movie. What does connect the two is the film’s evocative, eerie cinematography by Dutch DoP Emo Weemhoff. The interplay between light and shadow, not just in interior scenes but also in the foggy forest, adds to the film’s strong sense of mystique, something Aroonpheng instigates by withholding the identity of the person who threw the lever in that opening scene. The cast is uniformly good, with Ittianunkul a standout in her portrayal of a desperate woman who is given unexpected hope of being reunited with her husband. Besides a somewhat overbearing and overly sentimental score by composers Christine Ott and Mathieu Gabry, there is very little wrong with the technical aspects of The Burning Giants, and Aroonpheng’s new film is perhaps not on the level of his widely lauded debut Manta Ray, but can still keep an audience engaged. Where the film’s fault lies is with its narrative, which is easy enough to follow until it becomes like punching through fog. That makes The Burning Giants an unsatisfactory experience despite the many things it has going for it.