This one I’m pretty sure I heard about on the popular Lowyat forums, normally a cesspit of dumb opinions but there is enough of a critical mass of people there to discover interesting bits of news. It helps that this Thai film is very popular, being currently the most internationally successful Thai film after having done especially well in China. Plus of course its high Rotten Tomatoes rating means that it likely isn’t commercial crap.

Lynn is a top student raised by a single father of modest means who earns a scholarship into a prestigious school. She becomes friends with Grace a gregarious but not very studious student. When Grace fails to do well even after having Lynn tutor her, Lynn reluctantly passes her answers during an exam so that she can pass. Grace’s rich boyfriend Pat hears about this and offers Lynn money if she could do the same thing for him. Lynn demurs at first but changes her mind when she learns that the school itself has asked for a bribe from her father even though she has a scholarship. This leads Lynn to devise a scheme that helps not only Pat but many of their other classmates to cheat, earning her a great deal of money. However the other genius of the class, Bank, blows the scheme wide open, causing Lynn to be excluded from an international scholarship. With her obvious path to studying overseas closed, she joins with Pat and Grace to organize a large scale scheme to cheat at an international examination for admission into US universities hoping to earn enough money to pay her own way. But to do that, she needs to enlist Bank’s help.

So this is obviously mass market entertainment but it’s a very well made one without any major flaws. It’s brilliant that it takes the usual tropes of heist films and employs them in the service of an elaborate exam cheat scheme. So there are secret communications codes, smuggling items past security checkpoints, an international conspiracy and good old-fashioned sneaking about. It gets a bit ridiculous in adhering to genre conventions by throwing all kinds of last minute complications at the conspirators but for the most part it’s all great stuff. Unlike many modern heist films which throw in so many twists that they contradict themselves, every step of their plan is fully explained to the audience, understandable and plausible. I even love that the stakes are reasonable. As one character notes, even if they get caught, it’s not as if it’s a prosecutable crime and the amount of money involved is large enough to make a real difference in the lives of Lynn and Bank, but not really that big a deal in the grand scheme of things.

Of course cheating at exams is morally wrong and given that this is an Asian film, you can expect that things won’t end well for the parties concerned. To its credit, the film handles this adroitly with just the right amount of moralizing. Lynn partly justifies her own behavior by arguing that the teachers at school are just as corrupt and that in an unfair society those who are brainy and hardworking like Bank and herself need to make use of all of their advantages to get ahead. Even the school principal seems more interested in ensuring that the school looks good than in upholding integrity in education. I’m willing to bet that a big reason why this film resonated so much with audiences is due to its bitterness about the unjustness of society and how the rich tend to get away with breaking the rules. The scene in which Bank is beaten up by thugs for example is pretty brutal and emblematic of what the powerful can do if they feel like it. Notice how Bank doesn’t even bother reporting it to the police.

All in all, I liked this quite a bit more than I expected. It’s especially disappointing as a Malaysian to notice how Thailand consistently makes better films than us. Even if the performers aren’t true professionals, their acting is serviceable and free of any major flaws. Most of all, they have a strong creative streak and a willingness to take a critical look at their society while laboring under censorship rules of their own.