‘Everybody Loves Me When I’m Dead’ Has The Bleakest Ending Imaginable

WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS

Look, nobody, least of all me, thought that Everybody Loves Me When I’m Dead was going to have a happy ending. But I didn’t expect it to be this bleak. If you’d challenged me to come up with the worst, most unceremonious fates for all of the characters, I don’t think I could have come up with anything harsher. But this, one suspects, is really the point. Netflix’s grim Thai thriller is a staunchly cynical and searing critique of an indifferent, exploitable financial climate, in which there are no winners, only losers, and the only chance of a meaningful last word is to die on your own terms and not someone else’s.

This is alluded to in the opening narration of a woman rotting on the floor of her home. Nobody has noticed she’s dead. The only people still ringing are cold callers looking for their next scam victim. But people will care, eventually. The death of this woman kickstarts a three-year-later chain of events that makes several people care a great deal, even some who never knew her in the first place. Such is the way of things.

Good Reasons, Bad Idea

This isn’t the only death that strongly informs the events of Everybody Loves Me When I’m Dead. The other is that of Shane, a long-tenured and loyal bank employee who is let go on account of burgeoning AI technology and a younger, hipper workforce that knows how to engage with it. Feeling stripped of his identity and his purpose, Shane takes his own life, crashing to his death in front of his colleague, Toh, and a junior named Petch.

Toh and Petch have their own issues. The former is a vice-manager who is chasing a promotion to help fund expensive schooling and medical treatment for his daughter, Snow. The latter is more working-class and is in deep with some local thugs led by a sicko named Sek. When Pet informs Toh that there is a dormant account belonging to a dead woman named Jit – the corpse from the opening – containing 30 million baht, the temptation is obvious. Who’d miss it?

Toh and Pet talk themselves and each other into taking the money. It belongs to nobody. It’d stay sitting there otherwise. In a nice touch, they’re able to get away with it, at least initially, since the bank’s smug young manager, Wut, offloads so much of his work onto Toh that he doesn’t see the email notification he gets when a dormant account is unlocked. It seems like a victimless crime. But not for long.

There’s No Such Thing As A Free Lunch

Neither Toh nor Petch really bothered to investigate why a random working-class woman had a small fortune in her bank account. By the end of the movie, they still don’t know all of the details. But the audience does, since they’re explained to us from the perspective of the villains. Jit was once the maid for a gangster named Kamnan Mhoo. He opened a bank account in her name to hide some funds, and she absconded with them. He looked, but never found her.

Mhoo explains this to his violent, hard-drinking pyromaniac associate after they’ve just got done butchering some poor soul for one thing or another, and the man, whose name I never learned – I don’t think anyone speaks it aloud – decides the best course of action is to set Mhoo on fire and go after the money himself. For this, he tracks down Adchara, Jit’s biological daughter whom she abandoned at birth, since only a living relative can unlock the account.

To make matters worse, Pet’s enthusiastic withdrawal of funds from the account draws the attention of Sek. He wants in on the arrangement, expecting Pet and Toh to continuously pay him off with big amounts stolen from dormant accounts. It’s obvious from early on that there’s simply no way this ends well.

Theeradej Wongpuapan in Everybody Loves Me When I’m Dead | Image via Netflix

A Violent Conclusion

Once the killings start, they don’t stop until the end. First on the agenda is Wut, who caught Toh in the act of stealing the money and promised not to report him if he left the cash behind. Naturally, he took it for himself. Toh takes Sek to Wut’s home, and Sek stabs him to death and takes the dough. Toh and Pet hide the body and try to pretend like everything is normal.

But Adchara and Firestarter arrive at the bank trying to withdraw the money. Toh and Petch refuse them access to the account, but it’s obvious something’s up. Adchara tries to flee, and Firestarter tries to kill her. She’s rescued by Petch and stabs Firestarter in the neck with a syringe full of what I assume is Botox, since it was established earlier that she does beauty treatments out of her apartment. Toh suggests using this new alliance to lure Firestarter to Sek and hope the problems take care of each other.

During the climactic confrontation in Everybody Loves Me When I’m Dead, Sek coldly shoots Petch in the head. Firestarter fittingly sets Sek and several of his goons on fire and kills several more in a variety of other grisly methods. Toh picks up a gun and kills a few more. Adchara almost kills Firestarter with another loaded syringe, but she’d rather he just take the money and leave them alone. Toh is less enthusiastic about this idea, but there’s little he can do. Firestarter leaves with the money, but he’s gunned down in a drive-by by a shooter in a van with a cute piggy sticker, which denotes him as another employee of the late Kamnan Mhoo. An eye for an eye.

Toh takes the money, deposits it in an account, and then surrenders himself to the authorities, claiming it has been re-stolen by a rival gang. The small amount he gave Adchara, she burns, along with a picture of her biological mother, Jit. Pet’s funeral is sparsely attended, and Toh is stabbed to death in prison in honour of Boss Sek.

In a final grace note, we see that Toh deposited the money in the now-dormant account of his old friend, Shane.