‘Everybody Loves Me When I’m Dead’ Review – A Dark, Violent Thai Thriller

There’s no such thing as a victimless crime, which seems to be the underlying point of Netflix’s demented, bleak, hyper-violent Thai thriller Everybody Loves Me When I’m Dead. A reasonably well-intentioned plan to steal a small fortune from the dormant bank account of a dead woman ends up making victims of everyone, not least the bumbling co-conspirators who came up with it in the first place. It might be tempting to do the wrong thing for the right reasons, but if this is the potential outcome, it’s probably safer to stay broke.

The compelling part of director Nithiwat Tharatorn’s film is how easily it allows us, the audience, to see ourselves in the well-meaning but way-out-of-their-depth protagonists. Toh (Theeradej Wongpuapan, The Pool) is a hard-working vice-manager at a bank. He’s honest and loyal to the company, despite it threatening to replace him with AI and being indifferent to the needs of his daughter, Snow, for whom he’s trying to secure expensive schooling and costly medical treatment for a very vaguely defined condition that makes her develop at an abnormal rate. When his junior colleague Petch (Vachirawich Wattanapakdeepaisan) tells him that there’s 30 million baht sitting in the dormant account of a dead woman with no heirs to claim it, he has to consider it.

Pet has his own problems. He’s in deep with a gang led by the sinister Sek, which means he needs big money fast. What’s the harm in dipping into a small fortune that would otherwise sit untouched by anybody? Who’d miss it?

This being a thriller, and a dark one at that, someone misses the money immediately, and it’s the worst possible person to be on the wrong side of – the nutcase, heavy-drinking pyromaniac henchman of a gang boss whose maid disappeared with his money. With this guy on the trail, and Sek and his goons trying to grab all they can, the stage is set for a story that can’t possibly end well and still ends up delivering a bleaker conclusion than you thought it would.

While it might be predictable in its broad strokes, if not necessarily how cynical it eventually becomes, Everybody Loves Me When I’m Dead remains compelling on the strength of excellent filmmaking craft and very good performances, not just from its leads but also from menacing supporting characters. It’s underpinning ideas – the steady encroachment of AI and automation, the general impersonal attitude of the banking industry, the cost of living now exceeding the benefits – are relevant and clearly deeply felt, but this is very much not the kind of wish-fulfilment fantasy in which the oppressed rise up against the system and its enthusiastic bad actors. It’s basically a cautionary tale, but it’s cautioning against simply being alive.

This – along with infrequent but notable spurts of violence – may prove too much for some. Not too much in a wildly over-the-top gore-porn sense, but objectively too much, like simply too bleak and uncompromising to feel satisfied by. I came away from it feeling a bit like that, as if so much bad stuff had happened that it had become meaningless and ineffectual. But maybe that’s the point. This is a film critiquing a rigged system and pointing out that even the ways to escape it are fraught with peril and barely worth the effort. A surprising grace note implies, in a roundabout way, that the only person who had it right in the whole movie was a pushed-out employee who decided to end his own life. That’s grim to a level I’m not sure anyone wants to deal with on a Tuesday, or indeed any other day. But I can’t deny that it’s effective all the same.