HOW TO MAKE MILLIONS BEFORE GRANDMA DIES

How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 12, 2024

People can be very good at hiding things about themselves, and it's not always to be deceitful. Some of the characters of How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies, for example, are hiding a lot that seems important and might actually make their lives easier if shared, but it's difficult to be honest about yourself in general and especially when it comes to other people. For some reason, that level of honesty can be particularly tough when it comes to family.

Co-writer/director Pat Boonnitipat's feature debut is about that idea in a frank and disarmingly moving way. The whole story revolves around a sort of deception on the part of its protagonist, known only as M (Putthipong Assaratanakul). He's a young man in his early 20s, who dropped out of college and now lives with his mother Sew (Sarinrat Thomas). The guy doesn't have a job, much in the way of ambition, or any kind of plan to put those goals into action. He wants to play video games professionally for an online audience, which currently count, as his mother notes while passing by the monitor, in the single digits.

It's not going well, in other words, and M has no idea how to increase his chances of breaking through in a crowded market, except to buy new computer equipment that he doesn't have the money or credit to purchase, and no other real skills or education to do anything else. His family can't or won't help, because they have their own responsibilities and problems.

Sew has her own job to keep and bills to pay for the both of them. M's well-to-do uncle Kiang (Sanya Kunakorn), a stockbroker, lives a long drive away from the rest of the family with his wife and their kids, and as for Sew's other brother Soei (Pongsatorn Jongwilas), the youngest sibling is deep in debt and seems to keep accumulating more as he tries to get out of financial trouble.

This, of course, seems like a selfish way to view one's family members, but that's where M is at the moment. It's all transactional for him, so when his cousin Mui (Tontawan Tantivejakul) invites M over to explain an easy job to make lots of money, he jumps at the chance.

The "job" is caring for Mui's dying grandfather, M's own on his father's side of the family. She lives in the older man's apartment, feeds him, and takes care of his needs, and while it's a lot of work, the reward, she imagines, will be worth it. In the last period of the grandfather's life, Mui has become his favorite family member, as well as the only one to tend to him as he's dying, and because of tradition and custom, Mui knows that means she'll receive a sizeable inheritance when he does die.

What's fascinating about Boonnitipat and Thodsapon Thiptinnakorn's screenplay is how blunt it is about these matters. It allows these characters to be self-involved, misleading, and almost heartlessly pragmatic, and in that honesty about their motives, the film makes them believable in a flawed but understandable way. Mui's "job" clicks with M when he learns that his grandmother, called Amah (Usha Seamkhum) by the entire family, has stage four cancer. Her children don't want her to know, so M starts visiting and ultimately packs a bag to stay in her house, hoping to become her favorite and be rewarded for his care in the grandmother's time of need.

Amah's not fooled, though, and that dimension of the character begins this story down an entirely different path. M suddenly has to be honest with his grandmother, about both her cancer and living with her because he's financially strained at the moment, and in trying to get in Amah's good graces, he starts to be a genuine help—making and selling porridge with her at a local market, buying Amah her favorite fried fish from a local vendor, installing a camera in the house so he can see if anything happens to her while he's away, walking with her on her monthly trip to the bank. There's more, of course, with some of it funny, such as when M offers his grandmother a sponge bath and is shocked at her lack of embarrassment, and some of it quite touching, such as when Amah can't sleep and the grandson offers his bed and asks for a lullaby.

The course of this relationship, as well as M's gradual change from a schemer to an actual caretaker, is to be expected, perhaps, but the depiction of this bond is genuinely moving, because the film gives us fleshed-out characters instead of mere vessels. M remains a bit conniving, trying to become Amah's favorite, and mainly wants whatever inheritance he can get, but all of that exists with his newfound appreciation and love for his grandmother. Amah may be wise about M's motives, but she's stubborn and, in regards to other people in the family, naïve, too.

In the story's expansion beyond this relationship, it finds unexpected depth, as well. Amah's adult children have their own plans for and about her, whether that be the sons trying different tactics to receive an inheritance or Sew changing her work schedule, because she wants to be there for her mother's chemotherapy treatments.

There's a scene later in the story, when Amah and M go to visit her well-to-do brother, that broadens the entire perspective of the narrative to a multi-generational struggle for wealth, love, and familial approval. Amah has her secrets, too, and hidden pains that force M to see her, not just as an idea, but as a person not unlike him and his mother, who has been overshadowed by her brothers in the same way Amah was.

It really is the honesty here—about what these characters want, why they hide what they do, and how those truths, especially the film's final revelation, come to light—that elevates this story beyond a simple, heartwarming one. To be sure, How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies is quite affecting, particularly in what we learn about Amah and the nuance Seamkhum brings to the role, but the film earns its emotional payoffs by treating its characters as real and, hence, flawed people.

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