I’ve been aware of this “genre” for quite awhile now. The Liminal Spaces. By definition a liminal space is a point of transition between two different places. The hallway between your bedroom and the bathroom. It’s not a place you “go”, but a place you are in while traveling from someplace before arriving someplace else. These transitional spaces aren’t meant to be unsettling, but they have taken on that characteristic. Why? Because they represent a state of flux. But this isn’t intended to be a deep dive or diatribe taking apart the concept.

I had heard about this movie and that it was supposed to be spooky. That’s enough for me to look into something. The first point to make here is that this isn’t a movie. Rather it is a series of youtube episodes. Six of them. Each wildly varying in length. The first, and shortest, being a mere 4 minutes long. The second ramps up at triple that length, while the third more than triples that again coming in at 46 minutes! The final three are in the 10 minute ballpark. 

Episode 1 Renewal. This is very short and honestly, very lame. Dude wandering in a forest looking at a flower and writing in a book. Thankfully it was short enough that I didn’t care how uninteresting it was. It does end with a cardboard mask being made. Which also made no sense. Later we will recognize it as the face of the Giant.

Episode 2 Beneath the Earth. Now we get to some intrigue. A man is doing a video blog as he walks through a field, so at least there is some dialogue here. He is looking for an anomaly he discovered while hiking. The anomaly is a hole at the base of a tree. Within the hole is a staircase going down. It appears to be a very long staircase with lights along the way. Now this is seriously weird and I am very interested in where this is going. After a long descent, he comes to a landing and the staircase turns, revealing another very long staircase. Eventually he reaches the bottom where there is a wooden door. Beyond the door is a room that leads to what is clearly an empty mall shop.

Episode 3 The Rolling Giant. The longest and meatiest of them all. There is a bit of him talking about having put trail cameras out to see if anyone else had come by, but then he goes back down. This time determined to explore beyond the initial room. As he explores, we see details indicating this was a mall in Dallas (rather irrelevant since we don’t know where he is.) I’ve been in a mall after hours back when my family had a museum in the art space of first Crestwood Mall and then Chesterfield Mall (Missouri, St. Louis area.) And it is really creepy and weird late at night. As our main character wanders aimlessly, he comes across the figure referred to “The Rolling Giant.” Simply a statue figure in the mall. But then it seems to move. And then disappear from his view. Eventually the Giant begins chasing him, but in a manner like the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who. When his back is turned, the Giant moves, but halts as soon as he is looking back at him. Well, not completely halts as he is on wheels. Until the Giant gives up the pretense and just starts outright chasing him. Our smart character finds an escalator and escapes up the stairs. But it is a short lived escape as the Giant eventually goes up as well. I did neglect one element here as during his exploration he finds the mall exits, but each of them is blocked externally by massive rock structures. Not unlike a cliff face. And while he does try going back to his entry point, the staircase has collapsed, trapping him. Back to the main area with him as he now realizes he may be trapped here forever. As he runs away from the Giant, he finds an office with a map that indicates there is an emergency exit at the very top of the mall. So he decides to try and find it. When he leaves though, the mall has been transformed into an eerie environment, overgrown with moss and the invasive nature of nature on any building that is vacant for an extended period of time. The Giant is now very aggresive towards him, but he manages to get within range of the exit. And this is actually a moment where the format breaks the story. He is trying to navigate walking along beams high up in the mall while still recording with his phone. At the very end he reaches the exit (which has ascending stairs like before) but has to climb over an obstruction to go through it. Because he is holding his phone, he doesn’t have the dexterity to balance properly and instead of escaping he falls to his death. This ends with his body lying on the ground out in a forest area with his phone next to him.

Episode 4 Life of a Giant. We get a short video here about how the Giant was part of a parade. Eventually leading to it going to the mall for an exhibit but being left there as the mall eventually became abandoned. 

Episode 5 Dispersal. Now it gets weird. Because this episode changes the story. Things roll back to our character as he is trying to escape at the mall. But this time he doesn’t fall! He gets out and we see him running through the forest/plains as he races to his car. And drives away. But then there is a weird perspective on the road that had me watching saying “Why would they film it this way?” It felt like watching a skateboarder with a helmet camera. 

Episode 6 The Remains of Valley View Mall (Post Demolition). This part is as meaningless and pointless as the first episode. Someone is randomly wandering around the location where the mall was before it got demolished. Occasionally the view changes from the empty lot to show how this was a place in the mall. 

Interestingly, the most fascinating parts of this for me were the slow and uncertain points. But those are hard to differentiate between the slow and boring points. What makes it even harder to parse these two into their respective levels of interest is that they are often both the same. Which I realize sounds contrary, but that’s only because it absolutely is. And that may be the best thing I can say about this. It had moments of fascination, but they were buried in moments of absolute boredom. And after getting to the end of it I sought out a video by the creator explaining things. Such as… The opening segment is about a botanist who is then memorialized as the Rolling Giant. Now for me, nothing about this came through in the initial episode. This idea expands further in intent (but not explanation at all) in the idea that the Rolling Giant has the soul of the botanist. This idea makes very little sense at all to me. Somehow 150 years later the soul of a dead man is trapped in a paper crafted likeness of him. And there is explanation about the Giant chasing our main character. The explanation though centers around the idea that the Giant was lonely and simply wanting to engage in friendship with him. But that makes no sense as his actions are clearly aggressive. Especially at the end when it races towards him crashing into a structure causing massive damage to the structure and cracking the walls of the mall itself. Oh yeah, and the moment of weirdness in episode 5 of driving with an unusual perspective. Apparently that was supposed to be saying the Giant had also escaped and that was him rolling on the road. 

I find this concept intriguing. And a lot of work went into it, I know this. But for me it suffers from the same problem that I felt Blair Witch Project did. It was too long. Blair Witch would have been much better if it had been more like 30-45 minutes long, the story didn’t have the legs to go 90. Oldest View had the same feel to me. Condense this into something more refined. And don’t get me wrong, I don’t need everything explained. I don’t need to know how or why the mall is buried beneath a random tree. But I do think it would have helped a lot to give a location to the tree. If that tree was in Kansas, then the revelation that the mall was originally in Dallas is very interesting. Yet not having a clue where the tree is makes the mall being from Dallas pretty uninteresting. Maybe the tree is in Dallas, and then it is just a weird thing about why is this mall suddenly under the tree instead of why is a mall from 1000 miles away under a random tree in Kansas!

There is part of me that doesn’t understand the modern obsession with works like Skinamarink. Another movie that the best thing I can say about it was that I didn’t worry about pausing it in case I missed something when going to the bathroom. Or to get a drink. Or to make dinner. And that is not a positive! And Oldest View has the same end result for me. The few moments of interesting don’t make up for the massive amounts of uninteresting stuff. And that makes this a complete whiff for me. I do feel generous though so it’s going to get a 2 star rating from me because there were a couple of things I liked.