Thai director Phuttiphong Aroonpheng returns to Venice's Orizzonti sidebar, where he won a decade ago with "Manta Ray," presenting "The Burning Giants," a dystopian mystery inspired by the real-life forced eviction of Thailand's indigenous Karen people. The film is a deliberately fragmented, elliptical work that dramatises state-sanctioned displacement and violence, but critics find its arcane storytelling and flat pacing undercut the tension of its many narrative swerves, making it a step down from the promise of Aroonpheng's earlier acclaimed feature.

The story was sparked by the 2014 murder of Karen indigenous rights activist Porlajee "Billy" Rakchongcharoen, whose community was forcibly cleared from Thailand's western mountains, allegedly through arson, with the abuses denied by the state. The film follows an infected man detained by masked mountain police amid a mysterious toxic-fog sickness, before pivoting through the lives of displaced Karen women, Aepoh and Aeva, as they navigate uneasy assimilation into urban Thai society, all rendered in a hazy, ayahuasca-like visual style by cinematographer Emo Weemhoff.