Culture

Rating: A-

The Selfish Giant is bleak. Not only is it about two brats, Arbor and Swifty, being expelled from school and scratching a living pilfering scrap metal for a crooked bookie in an impoverished town in Northern England, it also features a beautiful horse being electrocuted and melted alive to make ends meet. As my esteemed cinema-going colleague Alex put it, it’s like “bleakness porn.” There was very little story happening, and I was impatient for events to unfold. Instead, I watched a long exposition about an area of England with socio-economic woes, comparable to Billy Elliot, only without anything uplifting. This was achieved by presenting dark, claustrophobic environments devoid of life or stimulus, with little sound or music other than the barking of angry, neglected dogs, and the shouting of angry, abusive families.

What I found deeply unsettling was that the characters were not on any journey. They were merely existing, as soulfully impoverished as the very community that had forgotten them. Even though they try to make money from scrap, they can’t achieve anything, because the “Selfish Giants” (from their limited perspective this is every adult in the film; but from our omniscient perspective, CAPITALISM!) are constantly trying to use and abuse them. There was no hope, joy, or love to be found anywhere – except, of course, in the eye of an innocent horse, which the director couldn’t resist reinforcing with gratuitous horse-eye close-ups amidst the human chaos. We got it.

Though I can’t claim to fully comprehend this movie, when the kids had a tiny bit of fun playing on a trampoline, and then got so desperate that they contemplated selling the very trampoline springs that symbolised their youth for two quid in scrap metal, I noticed myself reasoning that this experience was so bleak and emotionally damaging, I ought to walk out. So I must concede that, whatever the hell this was, it was effective.