The last character seen in the trailer for I Kill Giants is another adult, but strictly connected to the young protagonist: Karen Thorson, portrayed by Imogen Poots. In both the comics and the movie, Karen is Barbara‘s older sister, and the one who desperately tries to take care of her despite the growing detachment of the girl from a reality that hurts her as much as it hurts everybody else in the family. As usual I will try to avoid major spoilers, but it’s not always possible, so be careful with the following.
Karen Thorson was the first daughter of an unnamed couple, and she lived by the sea in Long Island, New York. Quite some years after she was born came Dave, her little brother, and soon after another sister, Barbara. Karen was much older than her siblings, so she mainly acted as a “second mother” to them… until she was forced to act like an actual mother, when the real one got sick. Karen’s mother, in fact, got cancer, and her father, not able and not willing to take care of his family, simply walked away, leaving Karen to look after both her dying mother and her little siblings. Luckily, she had a good job, and she earned enough to keep the house going even by herself. The only thing she had to endure was the presence of an unpleasant colleague, whom she nicknamed Stinky for obvious reasons, and who she was forced to share her cubicle and computer with. Quite a hard-worker, however, Karen managed to impress her boss, Mr. Guggenheim, and she was eyed upon as a new executive assistant (a promotion that would have allowed her to earn more to take care of her family, and to finally get rid of Stinky). As much as she committed herself to it, however, nothing was easy, and her brother and sister, back home, weren’t exactly helpful. Among Karen’s many talents, cooking most certainly wasn’t one of these, something that neither Dave nor Barbara failed to make her notice, mocking her meals ever night at dinner. Plus, the situation with Barbara was becoming increasingly harder, especially from the moment the girl refused to set foot in her mother’s bedroom.
Unable to cope with her mother’s situation, in fact, Barbara had locked herself into a world of fantasy, in which the woman’s disease was an approaching giant, and she was the only one able to stop it. Karen did her best to reach her, and even tolerated that her little sister transformed her bedroom in some sort of little fortress, but it surely wasn’t an easy situation. The tension obviously affected the family’s relationships, and even Dave often snapped, forcing Karen to mediate between him and Barbara, who was usually the target of his anger. Even on the talking side, however, there wasn’t much Karen was able to do, and she found herself totally unable to manage either Dave’s outbursts and Barbara’s evasions. She knew that Barbara was scared to death by her mother and by her illness, but she simply didn’t know how to speak to her. Plus, things started going bad at school also: Karen knew that from time to time Barbara talked back to teachers, but she surely wasn’t expecting a call at work from the school psychologist, Mrs. Molle, who told her she had just been slapped by the girl during one of their meetings. When she tried to confront Barbara about it at dinner, she only had her sister talking back to her as usual, and, in rage, she ended up putting her own hand in the frying pan by mistake, burning herself. That pain channeled all her pain, and Karen, for the first time since it all began, said it out loud that she couldn’t do everything alone, that she needed her siblings’ help, that she would have wanted her father to be there, that she was scared and sad for what was happening to her mother… but once again, as she started talking about mom, Barbara turned deaf ears, and went out, setting traps on the beach for the giant. Maybe she really was unable to reach her, after all…
Karen Thorson is a very young woman in a very bad situation, forced to grow up before time and to be a mother for her little brother and little sister. Not exactly a good housewife nor a good talker, Karen does her best with what she has, and hopes that all her remarkable efforts eventually lead to something, albeit, with no result to be accounted for, she’s feeling all the pain, the fatigue and the sadness of an impossible condition.