Sleeping Giant (film)

Sleeping Giant is a 2015 Canadian drama film written and directed by Andrew Cividino. The film follows three teenage boys coping with boredom in cottage country on the shores of Lake Superior.

The film premiered in the Critics' Week section at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. It is an expansion of a short film that Cividino made in 2013, which was nominated for Best Live Action Short Drama at the 3rd Canadian Screen Awards. The film is named after the Sleeping Giant cliffs near Thunder Bay.

Plot
Teenage Adam Hudson is spending his summer vacation with his upper middle-class parents in Thunder Bay on rugged Lake Superior. His dull routine is given a jumpstart when he befriends Riley and Nate, working-class cousins staying with their grandmother, who pass their ample free time with debauchery and reckless cliff jumping. Sporadically joined by Adam's friend Taylor, the three boys become inseparable, but their friendship is uneasy and rife with hormonal tension, bullying and jealousy.

Riley witnesses Adam's father engaging an extramarital affair with a local shopkeeper and tells Adam, who begins to act out in his father's company and engage in increasingly dangerous mischief with his friends. The revelation of his father's infidelity triggers a series of irreversible events that test the bonds of friendship and change the boys forever.

Influences
Cividino has listed numerous films and filmmakers as influences for Sleeping Giant, including Peter Weir's Picnic At Hanging Rock, Mike Nichols' The Graduate, and Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank.

Critical reception
On review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 87% based on 23 reviews, and an average rating of 7.5/10. On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 71 out of 100, based on 5 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

Variety's Guy Lodge called the film an "accomplished debut," adding, "Cividino depicts the tricky male power games between the boys with tact and compassionate impartiality." Jessica Kiang for The Playlist wrote "Perhaps most impressive is how, despite the nostalgia inherent in this kind of endeavor, Sleeping Giant never sentimentalizes its story, and never compromises on the essentially bleak idea that you can be transformed from a carefree child shading your eyes from the glare of a huge, wide future to a scarred and haunted young adult in a single moment."

Accolades
Sleeping Giant won Best Canadian First Feature Film at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival. It also took home the Best Canadian Film award at the Vancouver International Film Festival. In December 2015, the Toronto International Film Festival named the film to its annual year-end Canada's Top Ten list.