How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies Review: Tender Math

Is How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies worth watching?

Yes, without hesitation. How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies is one of the finest family dramas of the decade, a film that starts from a cynical premise and arrives somewhere profoundly humane. Pat Boonnitipat’s debut feature is funny about money and honest about duty, and the central pairing of Putthipong Assaratanakul and Usha Seamkhum is exceptional. If there is a caveat, it is that the film is built to make you cry, and it will, but it earns those tears through observation rather than manipulation.

What is How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies about?

How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies follows M (Putthipong Assaratanakul), a young man in Bangkok drifting without much direction and struggling to earn a living as an online gaming streamer. When his grandmother, Amah (Usha Seamkhum), is diagnosed with a terminal illness, he spots an opportunity: he moves in to become her full-time carer, partly out of affection but largely because he hopes she will leave him her house.

Amah is nobody’s fool. She still gets up before dawn to sell congee, keeps her own counsel about money and sees through her grandson faster than he would like. Meanwhile M’s mother (Sarinrat Thomas) and his uncles, including the eldest (Sanya Kunakorn), have their own ideas about what they are owed. Pat Boonnitipat directs this Thai drama in Thai, and it runs 127 minutes.

A premise that turns itself inside out

The film’s cleverest move is to take M’s greed seriously. The script never pretends he is secretly a saint; it lets his scheming play out as comedy, with small humiliations, calculations and awkward attempts to perform devotion. Because the film begins by admitting how transactional family care can be, its gradual shift towards tenderness feels earned rather than preached.

Boonnitipat has a sharp eye for the texture of a Sino-Thai household: the cramped old family house, the meals where affection is expressed through food and complaint, the way resentment between siblings leaks out over who visited whom and who paid for what. The comedy comes from recognition. Almost every viewer will know a version of these arguments, and the film is generous enough to let every relative have a point.

Usha Seamkhum and Billkin make it sing

Usha Seamkhum, a first-time screen actor in her seventies, gives Amah a dry, stubborn wit that stops the film tipping into sentimentality. She is funny, occasionally petty and fiercely self-reliant, and her small gestures, the pause before a reply, the refusal to be fussed over, carry enormous weight. It is one of the great grandmother performances in recent cinema.

Putthipong Assaratanakul, the singer-actor known as Billkin, has the harder job of making M likeable while he is plainly on the make. He manages it through a slowly dawning attentiveness, as the young man starts to notice things he had spent years ignoring. The chemistry between the two is the film’s engine, and their scenes together have the loose, lived-in rhythm of real family.

Where some viewers may resist

The direction occasionally leans on familiar weepie tools, a swelling score here, a lingering close-up there, and the final stretch is designed to wring out every emotion it can. Viewers who dislike being steered will notice the machinery. The film’s honesty about ageing, illness and money earns it the right to those moments, but it is a heartfelt drama first and a subtle one second.

Who should watch How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies?

Anyone who has cared for an ageing parent or grandparent, or argued with siblings about who should, will find it hits close to home. It also suits viewers who like gentle comedy-drama built on character rather than plot. At a little over two hours, it moves easily. There is no violence and little strong language; the emotional content around illness and death is the main consideration, and tissues are advisable.

If it moves you, try these next:

• Bad Genius, another Thai hit that turns money, ambition and family pressure into gripping popular cinema.
• Hunger, a darker Thai film in which food and cooking become a language for class and ambition.
• A Useful Ghost, a stranger Thai comedy-drama that also finds humour in grief and family obligation.

The verdict

How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies takes a mercenary hook and turns it into a moving study of love, obligation and the time we waste before we notice what matters. Two superb performances and a sharp, generous script make it essential viewing.

Rating: 5/5